Kachai Thai Kitchen

Kachai has been feeding Poulsbo since 1992, and the family's own account of how it got here is the reason the cooking tastes the way it does. San and Lani Tran came to Bainbridge Island with their nine children in the early 1980s, out of a refugee camp in Thailand, and opened the restaurant a decade after arriving.

The menu is broad and the kitchen is confident across it, but the dishes the restaurant itself points at are a good guide: chicken satay off the grill with peanut sauce, cashew chicken, grilled pork collar, Thai fried rice, and khao soi, the northern curry noodle soup that is still hard to find outside Seattle. The room is bigger and more polished than a strip mall address suggests, with a proper bar, and it holds over a thousand Google reviews at four and a half stars, which is a lot of returning customers for a restaurant this size.

Open 11:30 AM to 8:30 PM Sunday through Thursday and 11:30 AM to 9 PM Friday and Saturday. Two different phone numbers are in circulation, so use the one on their own site if you are booking.