Thailand’s Center Point

Order the homok (steamed seafood curry) which is off menu as well as watercress with chu Chee shrimp. Both great
Very friendly waitstaff

One of my favorite Thai restaurant. The food is amazing. I love their crispy prawns, jumbo shrimp in pepper sauce, panang curry and crispy papaya salad. This is not a fancy restaurant, and the service may be spotty due to the owner/​chef cooking all the meals however the food is spot on.

Pros: Best Thai food I have ever had.
Cons: It is not next door to my house.
We had pad thai and salted fish fried rice. It was heaven on a plate. I eat tons of Thai food and my favorites have been in Chicago and Boston. Center Point has stolen the crowning title now. I will be back for more.
Note: The google address is not the actual address. It was slightly confusing to find.

I’m so excited to be living so close to Thailand’s Center Point. While Sripraphai down the street is also great, that restaurant can get pretty crowded during rush hour, whereas TCP has a much more chill and homegrown vibe. On my visit, the restaurant was 90% restaurant and only 10% grocery — maybe that section is slowly phasing out?
The best part to me is that TCP offers 20 different and delicious-​sounding salads that I can’t wait to try. For my first visit, we got the papaya salad, the original thai fried rice and the beef ball soup. Both were excellent. As an AAPI, I never typically order fried rice as it’s usually a cop-​out dish. This dish, however, was bombbbb. The rice was moist and flavorful with tender pieces of egg and veggies throughout. I really dug the beef ball soup — it was very homey and the meatballs had great texture.
This going to be my go-​to place from now on. If I have to take friends out, I’ll probably be at Sripraphai, but for pretty much any other circumstance, I’ll definitely be here.

Love this place! Their basil fried rice is my fave. But leave a little room for the amazing dessert! Thai Iced tea ice cream with some sort of banana rolls. Hmm yummy!

Such a warm and homey Thai restaurant … with the craziest som tum (papaya salad) ever, the strips of papaya are deep fried! It is like eating fried Japanese gobo (burdock) sticks which you can often get at izakayas. I think we also got an eggplant stir fry and one other thing… sorry my mind was so clouded by the amazing som tum. :) I’ll be back, since I’m hopefully moving to the hood soon!

20 seat amazing Thai restaurant. The owner is also the chef. Authentic delicious food, made like only a mother could make for her family.
Get it. Its great!

BYOB which was great. Service was okay I mean it did take awhile for the lady to come around. Ordered a dish and asked for no spicy. and somehow it came out medium. It was so spicy it was burning! Thank goodness they remade the food and asked if I wanted to change my order. Ordered a chicken with flat noodle. there was more scambled egg in there then pieces of chicken. It’s a decent place where you can get grocery too .but I have tried better thai food.

Excellent food. Homestyle and made with love. The popcorn tofu is outrageously good and so is the signature papaya salad. We also had the fried veggie rolls and pork wontons. Can’t wait to go back here. Décor is cute with thai ingredients for sale, too. BYOB! They accommodated our vegetarian friends, too.

Always amazing service!!! Food packaged perfect to go for us always when we are lazy and don’t want to leave the house!!! Ginger is always nice and knows everyone by name! Love love love this place!

BYOB! That should be enough reason to go here !
My friends and I love coming here as a place to get good thai food and drink our own favorite wine. This place can do no wrong in my eyes, EXCEPT on Saturdays. Why on Saturdays you ask? Well the lady who works here on Saturdays is not only rude, but I am convinced she has bi-​polar disorder. I love coming here any other day of the week when the younger girl is there (owners daughter). But wow, the lady on Saturday is crazy. One minute she’s happy and the next she’s being rude and ignoring us. I have witnessed with my own eyes how rude she can be to other customers.
As a regular at this restaurant I expect better service. I would give this place 5 stars if it weren’t for the crazy lady.

This review is only for the thai iced tea.
It seemed like there was only one person managing the whole restaurant. A middle aged lady quickly took my order and got me the tea quickly. Little did I know that she would take on a whole other persona over the phone.
After I discovered that I misplaced metrocard I gave the restaurant a call to see if I had dropped it there. One word is enough to describe her tone: RUDE. After I nicely asked if I had dropped my metrocard there, she snapped at me saying «I’m standing right here and there’s nothing!» then abruptly hung up on me. Thank goodness for the good people of Woodside who left my metrocard in the middle of the crosswalk where I had dropped it. Whew almost lost $ 10.
What if I was about to order something? She would have just lost a customer. I was looking forward to trying this place’s dishes but now I don’t know if I want to even go back. I was going to give 3 stars for the iced tea (it was really sweet and ²⁄₃^rd of the cup was ice). But because of the bad customer service I am really tempted to give it 1 star.

Golden bag– Tastey. Fried wonton like things. With fresh ground pork.
Salmon curry-​amazing. The skin was super crispy yet the meat was very moist. The sauce was also not overwhelming. It was not too creamy with the right amount of spice.
Shrimp pad thai– I really liked that was not greasy and not too peanutty.
Fish cakes– ok
Fried papaya salad-​also amazing. It had tons of fresh seafood and loads of flavor. Eat it quick because it does tend to get soggy after a while, especially the pieces at the bottom that had been soaking with the dressing.
Thai fried/​roasted chicken — too salty. Not a fan.
I really loved this place. It reminds me a lot of what Sripraphai used to be in the very beginning. The prices are also very reasonable with each dish being about $ 10 – 15. The downside is that it sometimes takes them awhile to bring out food. The salmon and the chicken took over 20 minutes. I think it is because they make everything from scratch and I think there are only 2 people cooking. This is going to be my new Thai place!

I have never heard of this place prior to tonight. It was a default to the fact that we’d driven out for Thai food at their neighbor, Sripraphai’s, except the kitchen closed earlier than anticipated. Not wanting to drive off from the area, I turned to trusty Unilocal to see what else was around close enough to walk to and Bingo! Down the block. Score? No, not really.
I am a big big fan of curry and anything curry based. Their massaman was a bit too sweet for my liking. Not bad by any standards, but it was a bit like getting sprite expecting water. I was expecting more heat and spice from it. The order came with roti and again, I was expecting thinner and crisper but it came out more like scallion pancake without the scallions.
The fried shrimp and «dumplings» off their menu were good, simply because they were fried.
Their mussels were okay but the broth they were in had a distinct flavor I couldn’t quite put my finger on which was okay if it weren’t overwhelmed with a lemony aftertaste.
Overall, it did its job and I came home un-​hungry. Ish…

This oddly named spot is a quiet Thai restaurant right next to the famed Sripraphai (
), and seems to get plenty of runoff from impatient people who had intended to eat there instead (tenous business model!).
They’re also part-​grocery… but there’s actually another Thai grocery right across the street (
) (also a tenuous business model!).
The food has always been solid, but if you’re looking for a great Thai spot to excite your taste buds, Woodside has other options that I’d put first. BYOB is a plus, though. Overall, Thailand’s Center Point is a good place to branch out a little from the typical canon of NYC Thai, but not by too much. Pad khee mao for the Sripraphai crowd will always be there, and it’s pretty good here. The pad pring is perfectly spicy, and their curry noodle soup is great when you want something incredibly unhealthy.
The cute, clean interior has a café vibe. It’s obvious this is a family-​owned establishment, to the extent that one of the staff once brought our delivery order by herself, still in her apron, which I thought was very sweet! (Granted, it was late and I live close by.)

How good is this place? The most spectacular dish of this four-​day foodie trip I’m working my way through Queens. Yesterday’s Crispy Papaya Salad and Thai iced tea were simply spectacular, filled with bits of flavorful batter fried papaya, shrimp and squid, lime, cilantro, garlic, tomato and more. The juice of the lime (I think) has been made into a sweet/​salty/​sour experience. Also a sight to behold – we eat with our eyes as well. Truly a remarkable dish that’s exceptionally large for the price. There is a lot of flavor going on in this dish. Somehow I worked my way through most of it. It’s an intoxicating experience.
Don’t expect to be bowled over by the restaurant’s interior. It’s a half-​way attempt at a Thai grocery on side of the room, and restaurant that seats maybe 20 – 25 on the other. Don’t come looking for great ambiance. Clearly an amateur concept and design. Come here simply for the food that will be placed in front of you. You will not be disappointed. There’s something special going on here.
Even more remarkable to the experience: later that day I’m on the #7 train headed to Manhattan. Train ahead stops in station because of a mechanical problem so all #7 trains are held. Minutes later we all get up and exit. My evening dining plan is screwed. I start walking, run into a musician with instrument on another subway (I run a music web site for a living). We get talking, decide to have a drink, then dinner follows that. We’re in Williamsburg probably 6 – 8 miles from this joint and chatting food and he says: «one place you have to eat in Queens before you leave: Thailand’s Center Point.» My jaw hits the floor, I whip out pictures of that afternoon’s lunch.
Before you go:
— Cash only
— No alcohol
— Unilocal’s map pin locates this incorrectly 3 blocks west on 39^th as of this review.
— Subway stop at 61^st & Roosevelt is your closest transit access.

It took me an entire year to try this place. Last summer I made the trip out here only to find the place shut down in the middle of the day for some reason or another, but nothing was mentioned about it on their website.
Then some months ago I came and placed a takeout order. I tried to order the pad kee mao but they had run out of the rice noodles! They offered to make it for me with the noodles used for pad thai but that’s really not the same thing.
Finally tonight I managed to try their food. It honestly wasn’t worth the effort. Me and my friend both ordered the pad kee mao, thai ice teas, and we split the spring rolls.
This was the «cleanest» pad kee mao I’ve ever had. Almost no sauce whatsoever, extremely bland. I ordered mine extra spicy and there was no spice detectable, while my friend ordered his normal and said the same. The chicken in the pad kee mao came in massive mouthful chunks, and the scrambled egg was one solid piece instead of being broken up. It didn’t really taste like I was eating drunken noodles, but plain rice noodles with just a smattering of sauce.
The spring rolls are the size of cigars, I uploaded a picture. I wasn’t such a fan of the flavor. The Thai ice teas were fine.
As others have mentioned, the place is sort of split in half between the sit down restaurant and a Thai grocery store. The store portion is really great because you can find some hard to locate ingredients required for Thai cooking (including fried garlic!). I’d recommend coming here to purchase the stuff and trying your hand at making it yourself. It’s really hard but I’d honestly rather eat the bastardized version I throw together then theirs– it was just so bland. Also the chalk wall that has the specials is somewhat covered by the groceries, so be prepared to get up and walk over to have a look.

4 stars for what it is: good, solid hole in the wall spot with great food at the right price… you don’t come to places like this for ambiance or service.
2 for 2 this week on the Unilocal recommendations! crispy papaya salad (spicy) and steam tofu pad kee mao (spicy) both packed tons of flavor and heat – delicious and how thai should be! The crispy papaya salad is not only delicious but a huge portion as well.
Service was sufficient. Waters always filled, food was served in a timely manner considering everything tasted fresh and home cooked. Nothing amazing but definitely good enough. Again, you come to these type of hole in the wall places in Queens for the amazingly authentic food at a great price, not the service.

Small place that seats about 30 people. Which means slow service. But whatever…
I started with a thai iced tea, as I do at every thai place because it’s the single most important factor determining how good the restaurant is to me. IT WAS GOOD.
I was craving crab fried rice, but they ran out for some reason. So I went for the soft shell crab instead. It was crispy and tasty but I couldn’t finish it because it was such a huge portion. I also felt fat afterwards, but that’s just me.
We got a bunch of appetizers, which were all good but not memorable.
Everything was blah (including my favorite, pad see ew) and just alright until…
THE THAI ICE CREAM. AKA thai iced tea in ice cream form. They gave us 2 full scoops each. It was delicious, creamy, thai iced tea tasting goodness.
I would come back here… if I could somehow find it again.

My bf and I were going to meet a friend today at Krystal’s for buffet lunch but they were renovating. Good thing because it gave us a chance to try Thailand’s Center Point which was only a few blocks away. My bf introduced us to it.
At first I had no clue it was a restaurant. I saw the first counter and thought it was an Asian medicinal place. a couple of paces after that… I saw groceries. The nice lady led us in and I saw the tables. It felt like I was in a foreign country and I just walked in somewhere and realized the tables are there because they serve food.
I had a really good and satisfying lunch here today. I ordered the Pad Khee Mao, Drunken Noodles. It is not the same as what I am used to as being Drunken Noodles but I have to say it is good, fresh and made to order. As appetizers I shared the Golden Bags. My bf got the Massaman Curry with Duck. It was DELICIOUS. And my friend got the Pad Garlic and Pepper lunch special which came with soup. It looked very substantial for a lunch special. Everything I tried today was really good. I thoroughly enjoyed lunch today.
It’s a family run place and I love, love, love it. The waitress here was extremely personable.
Personally I like this place better than another nearby place.