Gah Bua Kham

This place is my jam! It is the very first place I tried Thai food and I have yet to find anywhere as good! Sadly, I no longer live in Hampton Roads, but my fiancé’s family does, so we stopped by this weekend to snag some of my favorite dishes from here on our way home. They were just as perfect as I had remembered! It was my fiancé’s first time trying their food and he agreed that it truly is the best.
Here is what I like and forgive me for my spelling, I have no idea how close I am to being right with it:
Pad Kee Mao with chicken– delicious in a perfectly spicy basil sauce mixed with a lot of different veggies. This dish normally comes with a different mix every time. At Gah Bua Kham they do a mix of carrots, broccoli, peppers, and onions. They also do something a little different here by adding egg, which I think makes this dish stand above the rest.
Pad See Ew with chicken– I like this dish for something a little less complex. It is a brown sauce with egg and broccoli. LOVE.
Yum Nua salad with steak– I have tried this dish probably at three other places before realizing no one does it like them. It is actually kind of gross elsewhere, but I cannot recommend it enough from Gah Bua Kham!
Cannot recommend this place enough!

It was recommended. I didn’t like it. Didn’t even finish eating it, and that’s rare for me.

In the years of eating in and taking out, not once has a bad meal come out of their kitchen.
I have tried many items on the menu and have never been disappointed. The staff has always been polite and are patient with my questions. Take-​out orders are packed carefully and never a spill on the way home. Portions are generous and I frequently get two meals out of one dish. Gah Bua Kham has a cozy feel and that makes for a homey eat in experience.
The garden rolls are always fresh. The curries are made with the correct amount of heat based on my order — I want more heat in the summer, less in the winter. My fussy significant other, a meat and potatoes person, adores their beef and broccoli. Every single time.

Tried a bunch of Thai restaurants in Hampton. This one is hands down the best!

EXTReMELY friendly staff. Was greeted and seated quickly and asked what I wanted to drink. Ordered a pad thai and basil fried rice. Food was prepared quickly and was delicious. Follow up checks were done and I could find no faults at all during my visit.

I love their pad Thai and their egg rolls while small are ridiculously good!
Its small and they close every day between 3 and 4, but if you’re looking for yummy authentic Thai food this is the place to go!

The food is pricey and the portions are small but overall the food is pretty good.

I have either food poisoning or stomach virus as a result of eating here. Will not be back. It was the only place I ate at today and I immediately started feeling sick while I was still in the restaurant. I felt great before eating there.
Update: called restaurant and really nice lady handled complaint. She was concerned I could tell but I won’t be returning anytime soon.

Great food made fresh! My coworkers eat there at least once a week. Enjoy trying new things and in the evening trying specials. I will confess I usually go back to my favorite Cashew Nut Chicken.

We have been here several times and each time we have enjoyed it. It’s quiet where u can have a nice conversation with people and just enjoy good fresh food. I normally get the larb chicken or larb pork. I have had other dishes here and they are all wonderful. I highly recommend this spot. you can get it as hot as you wish or mild. I think they are spot on with the heat!

Picking up some Korean Spring Rolls to go with some pork meatballs and noodles I cooked at the house. I hope its good !

Stopped in for lunch with a friend earlier this week… as always, the food was tasty.
We both had the pad see ew with chicken and a bit of spice… it was great! I also had a Thai tea.
The only drawback is that it is located in a strip mall, so parking can be a challenge sometimes… also, the restaurant is small and fills up fast for lunch.

Not bad, they’ll spice it up to your liking/​tolerance, but the duck was too fatty.

The other reviews sound completely opposite of my lovely experience here. We were greated by a nice smile seated immediately and served some tasty thai food. I was given a choice of 1 through 5 for the spice level of my pineapple fried rice. I ordered the #2 and couldnt get down a second bite it was so spicy. I’m a light weight in the spice department so I guess I bit off more then I can chew on that one. Anyway a new mild dish came right out and I devoured
the end of the meal we were served homade chocolates. which was candied nuts and pretzels hand dipped in peppermint spiked chocolate, and a Xmas card. Seriously?I felt like i was at a dinner party with friends. very personable and sweet. I will be back those chocolates were delish!

We had a long red-​eye flight from the Pacific Northwest to Newport News and were all very hungry after our soundcheck in Hampton. We had a craving for Thai food (since it’s comfort food for the entire band) and the Unilocal Mobile app directed us here.
Our waitress, April, was an absolute sweetheart. Southern hospitality to a tee. The food was great too. I had the pad see ew, one of my Thai food staples. It was very very good. I also had a cup of tom yum kai, and it was very flavorful. (sidenote: I’ve been sporting a cold, so I’ve been having a lot of tom yum kai lately. This one was definitely among the best I had the last two weeks). One of my bandmates had the duck basil dish, which I was curious about. I asked how it was and he said simply one word. «Awesome». Lucky me, he doesn’t like green peppers, so I got to vulture the last few bites of peppers, rice, and basil sauce. He was absolutely right.
Gah Bua Kham definitely made my first meal in Hampton a lovely one. Next time I’m in town, it will once again have to be my first meal in town!

Legit. Solid. I’d recommend it to my friends…
Probably the best things I can say about this joint. Very «mom-and-pop“ish location. Nothing flashy… maybe even some below average décor… but the food is hands down the best Thai I’ve found in the area. Granted, I’m new here… so maybe I need to expand my «area» but being a creature of convenience (read: lazy), I’m not likely to travel far for dinner or lunch unless I happen to be somewhere else.
Green curry and drunken noodle are a long standing fav of mine, and this place does it as good as any other, if not better. Recently, a «new» waitress has started working the scene… I say «new» because she’s new to me, but apparently has worked there before. Very knowledgable on local restaurants and is more than willing to give recommendations on the local food industry.
Being from California, and having lived in places like San Diego and San Francisco… I’ll always be more partial to my fav places back home, but now that I’m living here… have to say… I’ll be going here for all my «Thai» needs.
Salue, and enjoy.

Okay… so I’m on a quest to find another GREAT Thai restaurant. People are telling me left and right there are better ones than my favorite place in the entire world. This place wasn’t disappointing but I didn’t get that feeling of contentment when I started grubbing into my meal.
You get a small, nice and quaint place. The ambiance is better than most Thai restaurants I’ve seen. It’s casual so you can rock the flip flops or stop in while wearing a shirt and tie or dress during the work day. There’s not a lot of seating but this place looks like they get a lot of take out business. I saw three different regulars pop in for lunch and chat with the staff. Must be the neighborhood place to be.
I ordered the Pad Kapow with beef — Thai spicy. By the end of lunch I was sweating pretty hard. Kudos for that. The portions were decent although a few other places serve a bit more for lunch. I had to order an additional bowl of rice to provide my favorable rice to dish ratio (I like rice!). The meal was decent overall… It wasn’t good or bad. I think I’d go back but would go for a noodle dish.

This is the 5^th time I have tried this restaurant, each time trying something new, but I will never return after how I was treated today. I ordered Cashew Nut Tofu for carry out, and returned back at my workplace for lunch only to discover that they had given me chicken instead of tofu. Being a vegetarian, I cannot eat this food. I called them up, and instead of being immediately apologetic, they spent some time searching for the ticket and informed me that the reason they had messed up the order was because they had not read the ticket. Well, that’s kind of your job, isn’t it?
Anyways, they told me to bring back the chicken and they would cook me a tofu meal. I explained to them that this was a huge inconvenience; I only have a certain amount of time for lunch at work and driving all the way back to the restaurant is a big disappointment. At no point did they offer to refund my money and make me the tofu. At the very least, I would have expected them to give me a coupon for a free appetizer or something to regain my goodwill. Instead, I drive all the way back, received the tofu meal, and was presented with 7 small pieces of tofu that didn’t even fill half the container. For $ 10, that’s the smallest portion of anything that I have ever received. I mean, you mess up an order and cause someone an extra trip back to the restaurant, and you can’t at least give them a decent portion size? No thanks, will not be going again.
The previous times I have been there I have tried 4 other dishes off the lunch specials menu. I was not pleased with any of them. They give the smallest portions of food of any of the thai restaurants in the area (with the exception, possibly, of Thai Erawan), and the vegetables that accompany whatever meat/​tofu you ordered are in short supply as well. If an entrée says it comes with sauteed onions and bell peppers, wouldn’t you expect more than 3 or 4 thin slices of each?
I tried so hard to like this place, I really did, because it’s location is convenient to my work. But after this, I would rather drive 20 minutes out of my way to visit Tida Thai in Newport News and have some actual quality food rather than feel ripped off for mediocre eats.

Thai restaurants are my absolute favorite and this one did not disappoint. When we walked in, it was empty but the small quaint place quickly filled up. In addition, there was a constant stream of take out orders.
I ordered the pineapple fried rice which I wasn’t that crazy about (there was nothing wrong with the dish. It was me… I should have known better than to order it.) But when I sampled my friends’ dishes, I was already planning what I would order the next time I came.
Before our meals came, we were given little bowls of a hot and sour chicken soup which turned out to be surprisingly good… although the bowls were tiny!
The prices are fantastic. The only real disappointment (the reason for four stars instead of five) was the sticky rice with mango. Although the serving was huge, it wasn’t sufficiently sweet. So I proceeded to pour on some sugar. I make better sticky rice with mango than the one I was served. And I’m not Thai! :/​
But overall I was very pleased. And I am going back tonight :)

When I am in my hometown I have really low expectations for food. When I found this place on Unilocal I headed over with much trepidation.
Its a simple low key Thai Place with maybe ten tables. The décor was cute and the service attentive. They also had Phở on the menu but the server was nice enough to point me towards something they could do well which was the Cashew Chicken. He said it was his favorite. I am glad I took his suggestion. It was really good. The chicken was lightly fried with onions, peppers, and of course cashews. The sauce was tasty too. The flavors all worked really well. I also had some spring rolls that were just ok. My lunch companion got the Pad Thai and she was not very impressed. I didn’t even try it because it did not look that appealing.
If I ever came back I will have to get the same thing minus the spring rolls. It was that good. I think that the Cashew Chicken is the safe dish based upon the server looking around before he told me what to stick with.