Cake Thai Opens Inside Wynwood's 1-800-Lucky

For most of this year, Phuket "Cake" Thongsodchaveondee, the Thai chef who dishes up some of the city's best South Asian cuisine, was relegated to his original MiMo District restaurant after the closure of his eponymous Wynwood spot, followed by that of his nearby Gaijin, a Japanese eatery specializing in intensely flavored small plates meant to be paired with copious amounts of booze.

Yet earlier this week, Cake opened a stall inside the Wynwood food hall 1-800-Lucky, where the eatery dishes out southern Thai street food. The new stall replaces Coyo Taco co-owner and chef Scott Linquist's Les Bahn Amis, which specialized in Vietnamese sandwiches.

"This is different from my restaurants in that you can kind of make a meal of whatever you want, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, which is how most people eat on the street in Thailand," Cake says.

Here you can choose from snacks such as grilled whole squid with spicy cilantro sauce ($12) or chicken satay ($8) and curries such as chicken leg massaman ($15). There are wok-fried noodles dishes like the flat rice noodles called kway teow kua, as well as rice dishes, the highlight being spicy holy basil pad ka prao from a Homestead farmer. Rices and noodles can be topped with proteins such as chicken, pork, and squid ($12) or duck, crab, and rib eye ($18).

This latest opening also seems to be the first in a spate of restaurants Cake is planning in the coming months.

Cake Thai is slated to open in the old Gaijin space on North Miami Avenue in February, he says, followed by a stall at Lincoln Eatery, one of the two dueling Lincoln Road food halls set to open sometime next year.

Cake Thai at 1-800-Lucky. 143 NW 23rd St., Miami; 305-768-9826; 1-800-lucky.com.