(Bloomberg) -- There are more than 2,000 Thai restaurants around the UK; almost all are Thai-owned. But until recently, few offered much more than Chinese-style, deep-fried starters, a couple of soups, the ubiquitous pad thai and “traffic light” curries colored green, red and yellow. Spice levels were dumbed down, coconut came from a can and the décor invariably had more to do with the 1950s Broadway musical The King and I than any nonfictional representation of Thailand.

So it’s about time that London’s Thai food scene has started to make room for regional restaurants and bars that specialize in authentic dishes, alongside inspired Thai-British fusion dining spots.

The chilli-and-fish-sauce revolution has been fueled by a clutch of recent openings. The new southern Thai grill Kolae in Borough Market and the perennially sold out pop up, Anglo Thai (slated to move into a permanent site early next year), both offer compelling experiences of the Southeast Asian country’s cooking.

It’s a movement that kicked into high gear last year with a couple of collaborations between chef Luke Farrell, who splits his time between London and Thailand, and the restaurant group JKS, whose imposing UK empire includes Gymkhana, Lyle’s, Kitchen Table and Sabor. The most high-profile Farrell-JKS project is Speedboat Bar, offering a downtown Bangkok experience to the Soho crowd, complete with incendiary stir-fries, with beer towers, a pool table and a late license. Another collaboration is Plaza Khao Gaeng, serving southern specialties in an informal, canteen-like dining room in Centrepoint’s Arcadia food hall. Farrell hints at future projects: “We’ve done the south, and Bangkok...” In other words, look out for a northern Thai restaurant from the team next year.

The London movement has also benefited from Bangkok’s expanding dining scene, as the city collects notable restaurant awards and grabs international attention. Once known almost exclusively for its cheap eats, Bangkok has become a destination for food lovers who want a high-end experience, often at a lower price than they would find in other major cities. 

“There’s a young generation of chefs, prompted by the Michelin Guide [in Bangkok], and a new perception that being a chef is a proper career, who are—respectfully—changing things up,” says John Chantarasak, co-founder of Anglo Thai. “It’s an exciting time in Bangkok, as well as London.”

At Kolae, chef-owner Andy Oliver, who also runs the celebrated Thai spot Som Saa in the East End, features dishes from Thailand’s Deep South, the provinces near the Malaysian border, where the cuisine is strongly influenced by Peranakan (aka Nyonya) cuisine, an ancient, fragrant Chinese/Malay fusion, and by Thai Muslim cooking. He credits the increasing availability of authentic ingredients like palm sugar and lime leaves in the UK for helping the scene grow.

That availability is thanks in part to Farrell. Although he trained as a chef, his travels around southeast Asia have produced a side business: growing produce in his Dorset greenhouses and then supplying the burgeoning number of London Thai restaurants: Kiln, Som Saa and Smoking Goat among them.

Among the things Farrell grows from the hundreds of seeds he’s imported: green papaya, key to som saa salads; several varieties of chillis; ginger-like galangal; and kaffir limes. At his restaurants he augments the produce with imported pantry staples, like spice pastes, fish sauce, soy sauce and palm sugar. “Our aim is to reproduce Thai dishes faithfully in London,” he says. “You need creativity to copy something perfectly.”

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Even places that have been around for a while have fresh energy. Take the 11-year-old Begging Bowl in Peckham. It’s owned by Jamie Younger and Jane Alty, two protegees of David Thompson, the Thai food acolyte who almost singlehandedly improved the quality of the food worldwide. The restaurant has come a long way in a decade. “We have lots of regulars, many of whom have now been to Thailand,” Younger says. “And as a tourist destination, it’s gone through the roof. We had to tone down the spice to start with, but not so much these days.”

Like Oliver, Younger bases much of his cooking on UK products, from seafood and meat to locally grown Thai herbs and vegetables. “We import some of the essentials, like fish sauce and palm sugar, and we might use three kilos of chillis to make a paste: We can’t buy those from Dorset," he jokes, about sourcing products from Farrell’s farm.

Chantarasak, meanwhile, uses almost exclusively local products. On his latest Anglo-Thai pop-up menu, rice was replaced with pearl barley; som tam salad, which usually features green papaya, was made with cucumber, and West Country honey from black bees fed on ivy stood in for imported palm sugar.

“Each chef, each restaurant has a slightly different take on Thai food,” says Oliver, about Chantarask’s alternate vision. In fact, it showcases the dynamic aspect of Thai cooking around the UK capital right now.

Some chefs espouse fiercely regional menus, other Thai-run places gravitate towards authentic cooking from all around their native country, while still others experiment with British-Thai fusion. The good news for London’s diners is that there seems to be room for all of them. 

Here are nine of the best places, new and not-so-new, to sample the top Thai options around London.

Kolae, Borough Market

Sprawling over three floors of an old coach house that’s a stone’s throw from Borough Market, the second venture from Som Saa owners Oliver and Mark Dobbie has a similarly industrial-chic aesthetic—bare brick and wooden floorboards—but a more intimate feel. On the ground floor, there’s counter seating and a view of the kitchen; upstairs are a pair of small dining room with the same menu. Standouts include the garlicky, shatteringly crisp deep-fried prawn heads (£5), the bracingly sour and chilli-hot green mango salad (£10), and the eponymous kolae  bamboo skewers. (The restaurant’s name refers to the southern Thai technique of double-marinating skewered food for the grill.) The options—mussels, chicken, red kabocha squash—are sweetly spiced and redolent of fresh coconut.  

Speedboat Bar, Soho 

The raucous, two-floor Speedboat Bar from chef Farrell is modeled on the late-night canteen bars in Bangkok’s Chinatown, and it’s terrific fun. TV screens are tuned to sports channels and ’80s pop music blares from the speakers: the ground floor is the main dining room, while upstairs there’s a bar and a pool table. Drink beer or whisky and soda, and mop it up with drunkard’s seafood and beef noodles (£22) or beef tongue and tendon curry (£14). “Prawn ceviche with seafood dressing” is its version of the fiery goong chae nam pla, or cured king prawns with raw garlic and a fiery chilli sauce, and is not for the faint-hearted. 

Begging Bowl, Peckham

It’s been open for years, but recently, Alty and Younger’s Southeast London stalwart has had some updates, including an all-weather terrace, and a new head chef, Daniel Yeo. The solid menu features deep-fried whole sea bass (£22) with sweet-sour green mango, tamarind and chilli, and smoky chargrilled venison sausage with ginger and coriander. The Thai-accented cocktails are super: Try the galangal margarita, spiked with lime and long pepper, or the lemontini, made with lemongrass-infused vodka. The bare wood benches fill up quickly, so book ahead.

 101 Thai Kitchen, Hammersmith 

This friendly, laid-back, longstanding West London restaurant has a menu that’s long enough to be an encyclopedia of Thai dishes from recognizable to niche. Isaan (Northeastern) highlights include laab gai, the aromatic minced chicken salad dusted with toasted rice; a dozen variations of som tam, or green papaya salad; and delightfully sour and meaty Isaan sausage, served with ginger. The Auntie Bee’s southern specialties are fiercely hot and delicious: Dry and fragrant kua kling moo (minced pork stir-fried with herbs and spices, stained with fresh turmeric), and a funky, bitter dish of prawns with sator seeds (aka stink beans), for £12. Their specialty gin and tonics, which come in fish-bowl-sized glasses, are a surprisingly good match for the food.

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Singburi, Leytonstone

This trailblazing, Thai-owned restaurant in the wilds of Leytonstone, is a favorite of all the new-wave Western Thai chefs, and a lot of other London diners: At this year’s Estrella Dam National Restaurant Awards, the no frills spot ranked, at No. 73, above famed dining rooms like Lyle’s and Quo Vadis. They take only cash and if you can get a reservation, you have to do it by phone. Booze is BYOB. The shoebox-sized restaurant offers authentically spicy, sensational terrific. Order the salty, sour clams in an umami-rich broth; the sai oua sausage, fragrant with lime leaf and galangal, and any of the specials from the blackboard—perhaps crunchy chunks of moo krob—deep-fried pork belly—piled on a plate with sliced red chillis.

Som Saa, Spitalfields

The food is as booming as the acoustics at Som Saa, Oliver and Dobbie's bar and restaurant in an old, high-ceilinged warehouse, a stone's throw from Spitalfields Market. Both chefs worked with the famed Australia-based chef David Thompson, and his twin mantras of “make everything from scratch” and “never dial down the spicing” are closely adhered to. First-timers should try one of the tem toh set menus: grilled chicken salad with banana blossom and toasted coconut, maybe, with a salted beef green curry, a vegetable stir-fry with garlic and oyster sauce, and salted palm sugar ice cream with turmeric grilled bananas (£35 a head).

Plaza Khao Gaeng, Covent Garden

Khao Gaeng translates roughly as curry over rice, and there is plenty of both at this reimagined Thai canteen on the mezzanine floor of the Arcade Food Hall, with its vinyl cloth-covered tables. If the décor is authentic, so is the food; few concessions are made to Western sensibilities. Farrell, who also has the Speedboat Bar (above), specializes in the coconut-rich curries and searing-hot stir fries of southern Thailand - sea bream with chillis, lime leaves and jungle herbs (£15), pork with pungent shrimp paste and bitter sator beans, all packing a fiery punch.

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Smoking Goat, Shoreditch

Smoking Goat started as a dive bar and grill on Denmark Street and is now housed in a handsome, high-ceilinged Shoreditch corner site in a former pub that’s downstairs from Tomos Parry’s famed Brat restaurant. The grill is perennially the star of the show, the source for dishes like fatty, generously glazed  spare ribs and caramelized beef rib Massaman curry. But the fried chicken (from £9.50) is also popular, as are the sticky, pungent fish sauce chilli wings, a bar snack par excellence. Bare bricks and exposed girders conspire with a beer-hall ambience to make the place ideal for a raucous night out. 

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Kiln, Soho

There’s always a straggling queue along the Brewer Street pavement for the tiny, much lauded Kiln, the other Thai restaurant from Smoking Goat’s Ben Chapman. A basement dining room serves groups, but all the action is on the ground floor: Stools at the steel counter offer a front-row view of chefs playing with fire at the wood-fueled grill. Charred, cumin-dusted lamb skewers for £3 each and Northern-style laap sausage (£5.80) are great appetizers; daily specials might include a smoked kipper jungle curry or grilled bavette steak with smoked chilli glaze (£22). The clay pot-baked glass noodles with Tamworth pork belly and brown crab meat is unmissable.

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