Hilo Siam

Been eating here multiple times — the food is great and very reasonably priced. Ingredients are fresh from the farmer’s market on the next block. Especially enjoyed their Tom Yum noodle soup. Also can’t go wrong with any of their curries. Will definitely be coming back.

Favorite thai restaurant in Hilo.
Green Curry, Beef Salad and Chicken Larb are my top 3 absolute faves.
Food is prepared super fresh to order with the freshest ingredients having the Hilo Farmer’s Market right next door.
They also participate in Express Waiters to have your food delivered for a small delivery fee.
Thai iced tea is creamiest in town!

Wow, what a find. We came here because it was near by. Unassuming building, but we were supposed by how good the food was. Such great curries. My Panang was nearly perfect and my wife’s pumpkin and shrimp curry was exquisite. If I’m ever back in Hilo, we will definitely come back.

I really like this place for their drunken noodles. Be warned that the vegetation changes. One day I asked for little cabbage and little carrots and it ended up with peas (which I hate.) but the noodles are fah reaking incredible. I dreamt about drunken noodles for weeks after and had to order them again and again until I got sick of them. I even ate my leftovers in the car on the drive home (I was driving) because they were so addictive. Now that’s love! Curries are decent. I prefer my red curry from another place but this place sells good chef Suwan seafood stew which I really liked. Food is a tad but oilier than normal but overall decent for the price and I would come back time and again for their food

I’ve eaten here a lot since I wrote my original review below of my experience with the Princess of the Jungle (below), so I’m upping them to 5 stars, not because there’s nothing to be improved (of course there is) but because pretty frequently these days when we want to go out to eat this is where we end up due to the combination of value, deliciousness, cool quietness, and central location with easy street parking.
Our go-​to dishes are the red curry pumpkin with chicken special from the specials board in the window ($ 8.95, includes rice!) and «Thai fried chicken» which is a big plate of really yummy fried chicken strips with special request of peanut sauce.
Also, their tapioca dessert which you better request as soon as you get in there, because on more than one occasion someone bought up the whole evening’s supply for take-​out and we were left with nothing :(Yes it’s that good.
It’s just a quiet un-​fancy cool spot in an old building in downtown Hilo. The owner is usually the waiter although one time his young nephew was the waiter and showed us his awesome tattoos and also turned out to be distant ohana to my sister-​in-​law. Very Hilo.

We ordered the papaya salad and vegetarian pumpkin curry. The papaya salad is covered with sauce and taste quite different from home. Generous portion. The pumpkin curry was not too bad but I had better. The rice is disappointing because it was cooked with too much water and makes it sticky rice instead of the standard rice I grew up with.

A gem! All of our food was amazing! My red pumpkin curry was divine and sticky rice portions are huge! I think our server was the owner. He was kind and generous:)The prices were so reasonable! Will return here and recommendation to friends. Thanks to the man in tie dye that recommended this place to us as we were outside reading posted menu trying to make a decision. You were right:)

We are frequent visitors to Hilo, but had not tried this place. We loved the Papaya salad, with its slight peanut taste. The drunken noodles was wonderful and the house favorite seafood in red curry with eggplants was out of this world. My wife and I were actually slurping up the curry sauce that was left over. We thought we would have left overs, but it was so good we finished it off. Truly a good find across from the farmers market. Service was prompt and friendly. I recommend it if you are in Hilo.

If I could, I would rate this place a negative five stars… and then create a Unilocal Star black hole to suck away any remaining stars from other Unilocalers (see what I did there?). WORST. EXPERIENCE. EVER. But big congrats to Hilo Siam, for inspiring me to become a Unilocaler! In 30 years of travel, I’ve never experienced such dismal customer service or humorous attempt at ‘cuisine’.
Noting that this place was empty (should have been a good indicator), we decided to stop in for a quick lunch. The one server couldn’t be bothered to greet us or even get up from watching a movie on his laptop to seat us. We sat and chalked this up to the more leisurely pace of Hawaii. After a few minutes, he put his movie on pause and asked us what we would like to eat (before asking for drinks???). We asked what the lunch specials were and were told to go look outside as they were posted outside the restaurant! Out of sheer humor we decided to abide and take a look back outside. Having seen nothing there that was a Special, we came back inside to be offered a Korean BBQ menu (???). Okay… in frustration I just ordered some standard Thai selections: Pad Thai and Pad See Eu. Horrible mistake to think that the food may be better than the service! The Pad Thai consisted of rice noodles covered in ketchup (this is not an exaggeration… ketchup), some bean sprouts, and a few large slices of green onion. The Pad See Ew also consisted of the same rice noodles as the Pad Thai (never in my life have I had a restaurant sub the same noodles out of sheer laziness… Pad See Ew noodles are called Sen Yai: large, flat, thin noodles). The sauce was slightly better than the ketchup used on the pad thai… and heavily peppered. The one saving grace is that this dish actually came with a few veggies that weren’t horrible. The ‘waiter’ eventually just brought our check… having not once asked if we’d like a drink, offered to refill the small water glasses that we had to request, or asked if we needed anything or how our meal was. He apparently did get to finish his movie though, as he continued to watch it at full volume during our entire ‘meal’.
I have a difficult time understanding how this über disaster can stay in business. Stay away at all costs! There are typically several food trucks or vendors across the street at the farmers market that serve actual food and may even greet you with a spoken word or two. If that fails just take your $ 30, bake each bill in the sun for twenty minutes, slice in quarters and dip in ketchup… you’ll be better off than dining at this joke

All the booths have duck tape holding together the seats. Food was alright. Ordered Drunken Noodles with chicken. Chicken was rather overcooked. Friendly service.

My boyfriend and I were visiting family in Kona earlier this January 2015. We decided to check out some of the falls and found ourselves in Hilo.
We were checking out reviews of places to eat in the area. (Hardly anything is open in Hilo on a Sunday by the way!) We were parked right across the street from this little Thai place, seemed like a quaint hole in the wall.
People seem to like this place from the reviews. A couple from San Francisco leaving the restaurant when we were arriving told us they love the food.
Honestly, it was a little too sweet for my liking. I was expecting more spice and less sweet. We ordered a curry and pad thai to share. Both dishes were lacking spice.
But, it’s still worth trying out for yourself if you are a lover of thai food.

The curries are so so good. They have superb lunch specials under $ 10 which is semi hard to find in HI. I’ve ate here several times and although other menu items look tempting I always revert back to mahi mahi green curry made hot.

Today I had a Sister date and Thai food was on our minds. We were the only customers there at the time so the food came out pretty quick. We ordered the crispy spring rolls which are always a great way to start off the meal. We had one of the day’s special which was Mahi Mahi & veggie green curry, Buddha Rama which is tender chicken in a peanut sauce on a bed of spinach which was super good if you love the taste of creamy peanut butter. I would be satisfied with eating just the sticky rice and the sauce :) and last we ordered shrimp & tofu pad Thai. Everything was yummy!

We stopped in here on our visit to the Big Island last week. My husband got the green curry and I had the pad-​see-​euw. Both arrived very quickly and tasted great! His curry had a ton of Asian eggplant, which we love. The broccoli and cabbage in my noodles were fresh and tasty. Prices were cheaper than what we pay in NorCal, which was a pleasant surprise in such a touristy area. The only strange thing about the restaurant was that they don’t have high chairs. The owner actually brought out a high chair (that I assume belonged to her family) from the back for us to use.

Visited during our vacation, and I’m so glad we stopped in here. The food was *excellent*, probably the best meal on our trip. I had the house special red seafood curry and wow, was it good. You should probably stop reading this review right now and just go get some. It’s worth it. Prices were very reasonable and it was definitely the best value we found on the big island. We did have to wait a bit (2 – 3 min, not a big deal) to get a table, as the owner was busy in the kitchen we got there; don’t be put off if there’s no host there when you walk in. The big reason this isn’t a 5 star review is that the booths that we sat in had tears in the fabric that were patched together with duct tape, and it wasn’t super comfortable. When the food got there, I forgot all about the seats.

Hilo Siam is on a good location. It’s next to the Hilo farmer’s market where you can get a lot of exotic fruits after you’re done eating.
Hilo Siam has great ambience and service is fast. I’ve been here 3 times and never seen more than 2 – 3 parties. The thai chicken noodle (~$ 8) and Thai seafood curry (~12) are fantastic. The portion is not bad for the price but it doesn’t come with white rice. It’s $ 1.95 for a mid-​sized bowl.
The curry has a bold taste and the noodle is perfectly cooked — not too soft, not too hard.
Overall, I’d come back to this restaurant again if I were to go back to Hilo.

Mild mannered waiter.
Mild spicy is available for kids not used to very spicy food.
Mellow Thai music playing, low enough to have a conversation.

Hilo seems like such a sleepy town. We were there for a long weekend and it seemed like a lot of the restaurants closed early or just weren’t open at all for the weekend! It was about 8pm and my boyfriend and I were pretty hungry after a long day of exploring the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. We were also in the mood for Thai and there are like 12 Thai restaurants in the area. Some were closed and others were packed. We saw that this restaurant was open and we were a little skeptical because it was totally empty, but it was our only convenient option at the time.
We were pleasantly surprised by the food that they served to us. We ordered Panang curry and basil chicken and they were delicious! There was such good flavor. The dishes could have used a bit more spice for us, but that’s an easy fix.
The food was so good, we came back and ate here again before we left Hilo. There were more patrons the second time that we visited. In addition to ordering the same two dishes, I got the tofu coconut soup that was packed with really good vegetables… delicious!
The service was also great. Our water glasses were refilled as soon as they needed to be.

No one was in the restaurant when we got there so service was fast. Food came out very quickly.
We ordered our usual–
Green curry with chicken
Eggplant with pork
Shrimp satay
Deep fried calamari
Thai garlic shrimp
Sticky rice
We tried the cucumber salad for the first time. It is like a green papaya salad except with cucumbers. I would rather have the green papaya salad.
While the owner/​chef was cooking our food, some people came in and waited for their table for quite a while until the owner came out to bring food to our table. The owner/​chef is the only front of the house person. His wife helps in the kitchen.
My husband and children really like the food there so we go regularly. It always seems slow there, but it is worth trying.

Hilo Siam is a quaint little restaurant in the downtown Hilo area, right by the Hilo Farmer’s Market. If you’re not looking for it, you’ll probably pass it. The place is small enough to be overlooked and the furniture a little outdated, but the taste of food is spot on.
I haven’t tried everything on their menu, but the «no-​fails» for me at this place are the pad thai noodles and any of their curries. Those dishes alone would keep me coming back for more. If you’re looking for a little dessert, their sweet potato tapioca is so yummy. Sometimes I order the tapioca first and eat it before my main course because I want to have room in my stomach to enjoy it.
The food is reasonably priced and their portions are big enough to share. Considering all the Thai places to eat in Hilo, this place isn’t my first choice but it’s definitely on the top of my list given the quality and affordability of their food.