Jin Thai — Restaurant in Lake View Township

Really strong, authentic Thai food. Best option in Edgewater. Very friendly. Cozy interior, maybe 30 seats. Not expensive, though it can get expensive if you want it to. A fun special occasion place (took my partner there for a birthday.) The Tom Kha is properly not overly sweet. The Spicy Basil is amazing. However, they do under-spice for American palates, so you'll need to be very deliberate in ordering the hotness level you want. (If you're a regular Thai-food fan, you know what I mean.)

They're also one of those places with a menu entirely in English, which is annoying if you're used to ordering Thai food with the actual transliterated names, as in most Thai restaurants. They don't even bother with the transliteration, and some of the descriptions aren't enough to figure out what the selections actually are. So be prepared for a potential conversation with your server to determine what is actually what on the menu.

(They also serve all the usual non-Thai options that Americans always expect in Thai restaurants, like Crab Rangoon and Wonton Soup. I can't report on these because I wouldn't order them here or in any other Thai eatery.)

But those are minor annoyances. They know what they're doing in the kitchen and it's definitely worth a trip across the neighborhood...

I have been to Jin Thai a few times and it has gotten worse and worse on each visit. To start, they are very misleading- they have a betel leaf dish on their menu and they don’t even make it with real betel leaf. We pointed this out to our server and she offered some lame excuse that they don’t have any betel leaf so they served it on collard greens- so wrong. She didn’t apologize. Most decent restaurants would simply call out a substitution or say they were out of the dish. Not these people. Second, one of the dishes we ordered is supposed to come with red chilies. When we asked where the chilies were (dish was all sugar and didn’t taste right without the spice), the server just said “oh this must be a different chef who doesn’t put chilies in there” and walked away. And lastly, at 10:05pm after we had been given our $100 bill, they came up to our table to told us they were closing. They basically sold us a bill of goods, served bad food and wasn’t apologetic about it, and then kicked us out. Won’t...

Me and my girlfriend came here craving authentic Thai food and we were so glad we came to the perfect restaurant!! They have a decent menu to choose from and the food was decent priced for its portion. We order moo ping which is my all time favorite appetizer and they make it super good with their home made sauce w a side of cucumber and tomato; papaya salad which we got spicy and it was super spicy Cai they put chopped up to si chili peppers (in big piece) and I ate a tons of it thinking it was string beans but it was DELICIOUS! For mains we got pannang curry and sauce was delicious but the chicken was a bit dry. The pad see eew was delicious! Wish we got more meat in it but because of how flavorful the dish was, I didn’t care at the time. Wish I had the room to try mango sticky rice cause it’s in season… Over all the food was 8.5/10 definitely recommend if you’re in the area for some hearty delicious Thai food!! The service was fast and good. The restaurant was...