‘GREAT LOCATION’
Small Business Spotlight: Sri Siam
EAST GREENBUSH, N.Y. » Sri Siam recently celebrated the grand opening of their new location. Formerly tucked on a corner in the Hampton Manor neighborhood of East Greenbush, the family-owned and -operated Thai restaurant is now located at 337 Columbia Turnpike.
Since 2012, when their first location opened, they’ve been serving up fresh authentic Thai food that has earned them a devoted customer base and many awards.
Owner Tin Ko, an East Greenbush resident himself, is very happy the restaurant is in its new location.
“I’ve lived in this area almost 15 years, so I know it well,” Ko commented. “The old place was in a very residential area. We had a parking problem. I found the new place in October 2020. It’s a great location, with better traffic, a big parking lot, and it’s closer to my home.”
In a “small world”-type of stroke of luck, Ko happened to be driving past the Columbia Turnpike location one day and saw the previous tenant, Selena’s Café, packing up and moving out. Ko stopped to talk with the owner and asked who the building landlord was, hoping he would be able to make a deal. As it turned out, the landlord was someone that Ko knew very well.
“I already had him in my phone! I’ve been friends
"I found the new place in October 2020. It’s a great location, with better traffic, a big parking lot, and it’s closer to my home." — Tin Ko, owner
with him for years,” Ko said.
The landlord is a close friend of Ko’s family. Ko’s son coached the soccer team the landlord’s daughter played on as a young child. The family were regular customers at Sri Siam and hung out with the Ko family several times a week. Ko describes the landlord’s wife as “super helpful in the community,” someone that “everyone knows because she’s so nice.”
Ko became the building’s new tenant, and he got to work right away.
“We had three guys in here every day, doing everything,” he recalled. “We changed everything from the floor all the way up. It’s totally different than (it looked) before. In January, we started moving everything over here, and we opened Feb. 4.”
The new location is warmly decorated with wall art and lighting elements that were handmade in Thailand. Customers have given Ko lots of compliments about the décor, the space, and the building’s aesthetics.
Ko has a long history in the restaurant business. Growing up in Burma, he was part of his family’s restaurant as early as sixth grade. When he decided to open his own, it was already very familiar territory.
For Ko, the decision to open a Thai restaurant was an easy one.
“My wife and sister-inlaw are Thai,” he explained. “My sister-in-law had a Thai restaurant in Virginia. When I moved here, I wanted to do the same thing. And I wanted it to be on this side of the river because there weren’t any Thai restaurants around here. There’s a lot in Albany, but none here.”
Sri Siam opened its doors for the first time in 2012. Soon after, a second location opened in Latham, but it didn’t last.
“I only have four chefs,” Ko explained. “I had two in each restaurant, and if someone got sick, we couldn’t cover for them. I also couldn’t give them as many days off. So about two years ago, I decided to close the Latham location. Now everyone is here. It’s easy to rotate staff, and everyone gets two days off a week. It’s much better.”
With Ko’s whole family including his sister-in-law, who moved from Virginia to work at Sri Siam - under one culinary roof, business is doing very well, even despite the ongoing trials of the pandemic.
“They love to cook,” Ko said of his family. “We never have a problem working together. Some people say it’s not good to work with family, but we don’t have a problem.”
When the pandemic first shut everything down last year, Ko said that the first few weeks were very slow. After that, however, business went more or less back to normal, and the restaurant did well enough that they weren’t stopped from moving to their new location.
“I can say we’re doing 75% okay,” Ko said. “Not 100%, but about 75%.”
One taste of any dish on Sri Siam’s menu, and it’s not hard to understand why they are doing so well in such difficult ongoing times. Everything is made fresh and to order. All of the appetizer dishes are made from scratch, and there are no frozen or ready-made items anywhere in the kitchen. Produce, meats, and other ingredients are purchased fresh every single day.
Dishes coming out of the kitchen are plated attractively, unless they’re getting tucked into takeout containers - and even then, it’s a very neat packing job. The flavors in every dish are balanced, with no one ingredient overpowering any of the others. There are vegan and gluten-free options available.
Stop inside, whether it’s to pick up a to-go order or to enjoy a meal in a sociallydistanced sit-down environment, and there’s a good chance that Ko himself will wait on you. He greets every customer, chatting with them and smiling behind his mask as he serves food and rings up orders.
Ko says the most popular items on the menu are the Pad Kee Mao, or drunken noodles; the Pad Kra Pao, or spicy basil stir-fry; the spring roll appetizers; the crispy basil duck (Ko recalled a long-time customer who tried it for the first time and then never ate any other meat but duck on the menu again); and just about every dish in the curry section of the menu.
What makes Thai food unique compared to other cuisines? According to Ko, there are two key factors: spice and coconut milk. Most of the dishes on the Sri Siam menu have some degree of spice in them, and Ko says it’s very easy to dial the spice level down or up as the customer desires. Every curry dish on the menu is made with coconut milk, something that’s unique to Thailand. No other country in the world that makes curry uses coconut milk.
Between the delicious food and the customer-oriented service, it’s no wonder that Sri Siam has won Capital Region Living
Magazine’s “Bestie Award” for Best Thai Cuisine for six years in a row, from 2014 on. In 2015, the restaurant was named by the Times Union as one of its “50 Essential Restaurants.” They’ve also got a certificate of excellence from TripAdvisor and a commendation from Yelp.
Ko cleans the whole restaurant three times a day. Hand sanitizer is readily available at the front door and at the counter, and as per the state law, masks must be worn at all times unless you are seated and eating. Ko says the rigorous cleaning doesn’t just keep everyone safer, it brightens the atmosphere too.
“When you walk in, you can feel it,” he said. “A clean restaurant makes everyone happy.”
Sri Siam is open six days a week, Monday-Thursday from 11 a.m. - 9 p.m., Friday 11 a.m. - 9:30 p.m., and Saturday noon - 9 p.m. The restaurant closes for an hour, usually from 3-4 p.m, to give staff a chance to get ready for dinner service. Ko will often use this time to go shopping if the chefs are running low on ingredients.