The authentic Thai food truck in Catonsville worth waiting an hour for

The line is always long, and on Fridays, you can expect to wait at least an hour for any of the dishes at Grace’s Thai Kitchen food truck. But customers say the eatery parked along Edmondson Avenue in Catonsville is well worth their time.

In its third year in operation, the mobile eatery has become a local hot spot, drawing attention online in food influencer videos and earning praise for its authenticity. Grace’s Thai Kitchen owner Nattikan Namsoong is searching for a brick-and-mortar space where she can expand the business, but none of it would have been possible without her truck and the shared kitchen at The Commissary, the outdoor space where she parks her truck. The Commissary, she said, provided an entry point to an industry she had few resources to break into.

When she was growing up in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, most of Namsoong’s meals came from the market stalls and storefronts that colored the city’s rich dining scene. “I knew I wanted to start my own business,” she said. But it wasn’t until she immigrated to Maryland in 2018 to pursue what she described as the American dream that she began to do more home cooking.

“Here it’s hard to get the food that I want and how I want it,” she said.

Namsoong worked as a waiter in several Thai restaurants and was consistently disappointed by the dishes. Some chefs used vinegar instead of sour tamarind paste in pad thai noodles, she said. The Northern Thai curries she grew up eating, which lean on bone broth and chiles for flavor, were diluted with coconut milk, inspired by a style of cooking more commonly found in the Southeast Asian country’s central region.

She dreamed of opening her own restaurant in Catonsville, looking to share a taste of the life she left behind. Namsoong recruited her younger sister, who left Thailand to help her with the business — but the pair had no clue where to start.

Neither spoke English as their native language nor did they know how to cook the dishes they hoped to make. They borrowed recipes from friends and family, and yet turning that research into a restaurant felt like an impossible feat. Where would they find a space? How would they raise the money?

“I really struggled at the very beginning because I had no clue at all what I was doing,” Namsoong said.

Then she drove past The Commissary, an incubator for food trucks offering low-cost space for micro food businesses to get their start. It’s one of several in the Baltimore area strengthening the pipeline for local entrepreneurs aspiring to enter the restaurant industry.

Jesse Stump, a property manager at CVille Properties who oversees The Commissary, said the communal area began as a way to offer more outdoor dining options to Catonsville customers during the pandemic, but has since become a go-to spot to check out new culinary talent. Wieland’s BBQ is a staple eatery in the corridor, alongside The Burger Smasher food truck, and now Namsoong’s “quite popular” eatery, Stump said.

Grace’s Thai Kitchen, named after Namsoong’s chosen nickname Grace, serves Thai street food the way the sisters grew up eating it. Their panang curry is spicy and fragrant. The fried rice, a customer favorite, is pungent with umami flavor, as are the sisters’ spicy eggplant and savory chive dumplings. Refreshing Thai iced teas are a delectable treat, especially when accompanied by sweet trays of mango and sticky rice.

Namsoong said they’ve been able to keep up with crowds thanks to assistance from The Commissary, which helped the sisters with paperwork, setting up electricity and more.

That’s not to say that running the operation is easy. Namsoong only has one wok to fry her dishes and spends mornings hauling her equipment from the shared kitchen to her truck. The manual labor of tackling hundreds of orders in a small space hurts her back, she said, and working alongside her sister can be challenging.

“I’m not going to lie, it’s not beautiful, but we hold onto each other,” she said.

It’s hard for Namsoong to believe the success her eatery has accumulated. In May, influencer Kimberly Kong included the sisters in her series highlighting 100 local Asian restaurants, which only led to more attention.

“Amazingly I cannot believe that people line up for my food and that I make something that people enjoy,” she said.