Thai Tamarind

Tamarind is the flavour Thai Tamarind named itself after, and it earns the billing. The sweet-sour pulp builds the sauce on the Pad Thai — stir-fried rice noodle with egg, tofu, bean sprouts, ground peanut, and green chive — and it returns over a crispy fish fillet, cut with sweet pepper, onion, and ginger, in the plate the menu lists plainly as Tamarind Fish. The restaurant works out of a plaza on Wilson Street West, in Ancaster's Wilson and Fiddler's Green corridor, and the family that opened it still runs it. The Thai cooking here arrives without a fusion concept — familiar dishes, cooked with intent, named for what they are.

The menu reads as a working neighbourhood Thai list rather than a tasting exercise. Green Curry is the curry it builds around, a coconut-milk base carrying eggplant, bamboo shoot, green pea, sweet pepper, and basil, kept mild and made without gluten. Chicken Satay brings grilled skewers under a house-made chili peanut sauce, and the Mango Salad shreds fresh mango with red onion, sweet pepper, cilantro, mint, chili, and ground peanut into something bright and sharp. There is Pad Siew, flat rice noodle with Chinese broccoli and egg in a sweet soy blend, and Orange Cashew Chicken, where a lemon-edged Thai sauce meets onion, sweet pepper, carrot, orange segment, and cashew. Peanut, chili, and tamarind recur down the list like a through-line a regular learns to read.