New Thai restaurant set to open in March
Massaman Thai Cuisine is owned by the Christman family.
The owner of the former Siam Pad Thai restaurant in Kettering expects to start hiring next month for her new restaurant, which will have a new name and a new location when it opens this spring.
In a message to this news outlet from Pakawan “Fon” Christman’s daughter, Damisa Christman, the family said they are preparing to open “Massaman Thai Cuisine” in March at 467 Patterson Road, just west of Shroyer Road in Dayton’s Patterson Park neighborhood.
“Thetime has finally come,after many obstacles she has gracefully faced throughout this process,” Damisa Christman said of her mother. “She couldn’t be more excited to be back in service.”
After some construction progress in early 2019, activity at the site lagged for long stretches of the summer and fall, but picked up again in recent weeks. Part of the delay was due to construction crews pausing to help with recovery from the Dayton area’s Memorial Day tornadoes, Christman’s family told the restaurant’s Facebook followers last summer.
Siam Pad Thai operated at 3027 Wilmington Pike just south of East Dorothy Lane from November 2008 and September 2018, when it closed after being unable to reach an agreement with that building’s owner on a lease extension. The Kettering building has remained vacant. The restaurant offered a variety of Thai dishes as well as an extensive menu of sushi and sashimi.
The restaurant’s new name honors the curry dish that became a signature dish at Siam Pad Thai in Kettering.
Christman helped introduce many in the Dayton area to Thai cuisine 15 years ago when she and a business partner started adding Thai stir-fry dishes to the menu of Yummy Burger, a downtown Dayton diner, in 2004. She went on to become co-owner of what was then Ban Thai restaurant in the Beaver Valley Shopping Center in Beavercreek in 2005 before opening Siam Pad
Thai three years later.
Over the weekend, the family changed the Siam Pad Thai Facebook page name to Massaman Thai Cuisine and posted a “March 2020” image.
That announcement was warmly received by the restaurant’s enthusiastic followers, who shared the post with friends and started asking whether their favorite dishes would be on the menu of the new restaurant.
“I feel like Siam Pad Thai has been closed forever!” one commenter wrote.