Stratford Thai Cuisine

Order the Pad Thai at Stratford Thai Cuisine and the kitchen shows its hand. Rice noodles come tangled with egg, tofu, bean sprouts, dry radish, and green onion, bound in a homemade tamarind sauce, with roasted ground peanuts set on the side rather than cooked in. It is the full structure of the dish, not the sweet shorthand that passes for Pad Thai in a lot of rooms — the plate a cook makes when balance is the whole point. Sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, with heat the kitchen will dial to wherever a table wants it: that flavour equation is the restaurant's stated identity, printed on its own menu, and it runs through everything the kitchen plates at its downtown storefront on Wellington Street.

The curry section is where the menu earns repeat visits. Green Curry Chicken is the comfort anchor — coconut milk, bamboo shoots, carrots, sweet peppers, basil, and green beans in one bowl — but it shares the page with Beef Mussaman, slow with tamarind, white potatoes, roasted peanuts, and fried shallot; Panang Curry, milder and sweeter under kaffir lime; and Pineapple Chicken Curry, where the fruit cuts the coconut milk. The noodles run just as deep. Pad Kee Mao answers the Pad Thai with wide rice noodles, long bean, and a spicy basil sauce, while Pad See Ew brings the smoked-wok flavour of big flat noodles in soy. The seafood pushes further still: Mango Salmon, grilled and plated with fresh mango and a mango salad on the side, and Baked Young Coconut Seafood, a mix of fish, sweet basil, and lime leaves baked with curry inside a coconut shell.