Thai Select

I’ve tried this place so many times, and it’s never disappointed me. I usually go with their green curry mildly spicy but the coconuts curry
Taste takes over! lemongrass chicken dish, and vegetable healthy rice! Even for a rice that is healthy it tasted great! If anyone is looking for amazing Thai food– definitely stop here.

My wife has super pad thai and I had to pad se ew. I had it with shrimp and it was cooked perfectly.

Full bar & good food on the cheap!

I used to go here only because it was near my apartment. Until I found a long black hair inside of my peanut dumpling. It was TRAUMATIZING. I bit into that dumpling naively, and I will never be the same. At least they did refund me though. I did enjoy their peanut dumplings and broccoli stir fry before that though. Too scared to ever go back.

good appetizers

If you are craving great thai food but have an event to attend at madison square garden, this is the place. Panang chicken, pineapple fried rice and the pork pad thai was perfect. Service was fast and food was tasty.

I know a good Thai restaurant when I see/​experience one, given it’s my most favorite cuisine in the world and that I flew to Bangkok to learn and get certified in cooking Thai food! So this wasn’t a bad place to start with in NYC. I can’t say it’s that good or great versus others as I have no point of comparison yet but their food was good and you do get your money’s worth.
Get the chicken Pad Thai, and Red Curry with Beef which perfectly pairs with a good cup of steamed jasmine rice. As for spicy level, I have a pretty high tolerance so proceed with caution. A good place to start with would be somewhere between 1 – 3, you can then build it up later as you become more Thai-​food savvy! =)

Ate here this last weekend and chose it because of its proximity to our location, based on the Unilocal app. The interior was nicely decorated and inviting. Tables even had a generous amount of spacing between each other by New York standards. Our server was friendly and promptly took our drink and meal orders. Both myself and my dining companion ordered a staple — Chicken Pad Thai, along with a glass of wine (an organic Chardonnay for myself and a Merlot for her).
While we waited for our meal we observed the colorful and aroma-​filled dishes being delivered to the tables around us. Unfortunately, not only were our dishes not very colorful (which is fairly easy to achieve in Thai cooking), but more importantly the Pad Thai was unremarkable. It tasted fairly bland and the chicken was dry and hard — a clear indication of previous cooking. It was probably the least inspiring and enjoyable Pad Thai I’ve ordered.
Based on this, I have to give the restaurant only 3 stars. I’m sure other menu items are good, but serving a poorly prepared staple like Pad Thai is rather embarrassing for a restaurant claiming a Thai menu.
Prices were what one might expect.

Loved it. Amazing service.
Great deals on drinks (weekdays 5 – 7)
I accidentally ordered a drink that was incredibly strong and I couldn’t drink and my waiter exchanged it for another without any hesitation. Food arrived SO quickly.
Green curry was spicy and very delicious.
Shrimp pad thai was very good.
This place is a bang for your buck and I enjoyed the ambiance.

My go to Thai in Hells Kitchen! Grilled tofu is incredible and their peanut dressing is the best in NYC! Almost as good as you get in the Thai Section of Shanghai. Their salmon is also the best i ever had. Highly recommend.

This is a nice simple place with a comfortable atmosphere and the food is quiet good. The Tom Kar soup (coconut soup) is delicious and the Pad see-​ew was very good and very filling. Thai ice tea was sweet and refreshing.

There are two thai places on the same block, make sure you go to this one.
Restaurant is cute, can be on the loud side.
Service is fast, and food is great. I had the chicken pad thai and might have been the best in the city!

This joint is located in the heart of what I am now calling Thai Town in NYC. That’s 9^th avenue from the 30s through the 50s. There are TONS of Thai joints on that stretch, and competition is pretty fucking fierce! There are lots of good places to dine here, and also lots of shitty ones as well. You need to know which is which, and that’s what I’m here for.
Thai Select is one of the good ones. In fact, it’s probably one of the best. The inside is decorated with a lounge-​like atmosphere, with exposed brick, a long bench seat with two-​top tables going along the entirety of the wall.
There’s a bar on the opposite end that goes about a third of the length of the entire restaurant. There’s even a back area that is elevated, almost like a stage, for larger groups.
Chef Toni explained that on Friday and Saturday nights it gets pretty jammed. This was a Monday at 6pm, so we had some elbow room to eat, at least for a little while. It did get to nearly full capacity by time we left at around 7:30pm, which is a good sign.
They offer happy hour from 4pm to 7pm, and allow you to take advantage of those deals from your table. $ 4 beers is a pretty great deal, for one, but there are others as well. We started by sipping on this cocktail made with citron vodka, canton, fresh ginger and lime called the Springter. It was incredibly refreshing and bright.
Chef Toni sat with us and explained some of the new endeavors that Thai Select is undertaking. One is a new healthy menu, where everything is gluten free, no MSG and no saturated fats, and which highlights the health benefits of various Thai herbs and ingredients.
The offerings on this portion of the menu roll out officially next month, and they actually look really good, even the vegetarian stuff!
Chef Toni has been in the restaurant biz for about seven and a half years, and is already juggling two other joints nearby in Thai Town, in addition to this one.
He’s created a menu that is accessible and familiar to people of all cultures, whether it is American, Indian or Latin, in addition to classic Thai dishes and flavor profiles. Everything is made in house from scratch, all the way down to the dumpling wrappers. Toni’s expertise shines in the food. Everything we tasted was really excellent, so let’s get into it:
We started with this bowl of moo dad deaw, or «pork poppers.» This is small bits of pork jerky that are crispy on the outside and served with a spicy, «fire sauce» that reminded me very much of the sauces made in Vietnam for eating with fried foods. It’s like a sri racha, but more orange colored and slightly sweet, as opposed to all spicy.
I couldn’t eat these things fast enough. I ripped through that bowl like nothing. I could eat buckets of this shit. PLEASE — if you like meat snacks of any kind — do yourself a favor and order this when you go. You won’t be disappointed. If this was sold in bags, I’d be stockpiling for armageddon.
Next we tried the peanut dumplings.
These are stuffed with sweet turnip and ground peanut, and served with a sweet soy sauce.
The wrapper had the texture of a really nicely executed dim sum dumpling, but it held up to cutting without falling apart. Really tasty and healthy to boot.
Toni also brought out one of their better selling appetizer items, the crab rangoon.
These are hand made deep fried wanton wrappers filled with whipped cream cheese and crab meat. They were very creamy and soft inside, but crisp on the outside, and came with a light duck sauce for dipping. While I’m generally not a fan of cream cheese with any sort of meat, these were definitely addicting.
The entrée I chose was a Bangkok spice pork stir fry wok dish.
It came with fresh peppers (spicy green chili and sweet red bell alike), green beans and onions. And a nice little cone of rice:
This was a really tasty dish. It had the kick that I expect from good Thai food, but without going over the top to blow out my palette.
My wife had what I think was the winning dish of the night. She ordered the pineapple curry duck.
This robust, spicy-​yet-​sweet curry is one of the best I’ve had. The duck was placed on top, skin side up, to keep all that delicious fried skin good and crispy throughout. This is actually smoked duck from Canada, so there is less chewy fat under the skin than normal.
There is no waste when you eat this — none at all. No bones, no messy picking up and chewing or gnawing through ca… REVIEW CUT FOR LENGTH

Came here for dinner. I ordered the Pad Kee Mao with shrimp and was impressed. Fairly spicy and very filling. Service was great and the bartender knew how to make a decent Mojito. It was happy hour so all cocktails were $ 6. That’s a great deal in NYC. If you love Thai food, you won’t leave disappointed. Cheers!

The steak is like a hockey puck and no teriyaki about it. Ordered medium and got well well done.
Just bland food.

Pretty awesome place. Staff was friendly. My order was really delicious. Also my grind was happy with his order too. I’ll definitely go back there again.

Not too shabby! We ordered from Seamless and had a nice company lunch. The pad see ew got gobbled up, and while the meat wasn’t great I thought the noodles were excellent. I enjoyed the massaman curry with chunks of soft potatoes. The green curry was only ok. I thought they could have been a little less watery, but the flavor was great.
Definitely enjoyed this a bit more than other Thai places in the area.

There’s a line in the movie 48 Hours that describes why I haven’t written a review for Thai Select yet. Your assignment, should you choose to accept, is watch the movie then submit your guesses. I look forward to your responses!
Anyhoo, I’ve ordered a gazillion things from Thai Select’s lunch menu and am always more than happy with my choice. My go-​to Thai dish is green curry chicken and Thai Select does it really well. And… I rarely get Pad Thai but had a taste for it recently and theirs is arroy dee mak mak! Not too sweet, not too oily, not too dry, very flavorful and very good size for a lunch menu.
Will be back.

The only reason this place doesn’t get 5 stars is because we had a slight altercation with one of the waitresses who deliberately short changed my boyfriend when he paid the bill. Not sure why because when he asked where the rest of the change was, without even looking at the bill she handed him $ 5 back.
Aside from that, the food was phenomenal. I was originally going to go with the traditional Pad Thai but decided to try their crispy duck with tamarind sauce. Best decision I made all night. The duck was cooked exceptionally well and was very flavorful. Sitting in a sea of the sauce it sealed the flavor beautifully.
The happy hour special was nothing to write home about but what I loved was how trendy, yet traditional the inner décor was. And even though it was busy, it didn’t feel über crowded the way most NYC restaurants would feel during happy hour on a Friday. I highly recommend for the food, but if you pay cash, watch your change!

Came here for dinner last Sat, in the middle of a Snow storm (less than half block from where I live)! We were seated right away, most likely b/​c no one else is crazy enough to go out…
We started with the tasting combo, which was good — our favorite was the spring rolls and fried chicken dumpling (like a fried shaomai), the chicken satay and curry puffs were as expected (nothing special). For entrée, we shared the spicy noodle with chicken and red snapper in three flavor sauce. The noodles were, again, as expected, nothing amazing. The fish was pretty good — It was fried and covered in their spicy sauce, which had a little kick! The meat was tender, but some parts were over fried and I didn’t know it was a fried fish (the menu did not mention fried, I guess I should’ve asked) — it’s just you never know how fresh the fish is when it’s fried, but for $ 23, what should I expect right?! We ended the meal with fried ice cream with chocolate sauce! Again, as expected…
Would I go back? Sure! when there’s a snow storm again :)

Un muy buen thai y a muy buen precio!!! El pad thai esta buenisimo, y los currys impresionantes, cuidan mucho la presentacion y tienen un servicio buenisimo. Aconsejable 100%