Why you should experience Krung Siam in Tokyo, Japan.
Krung Siam is a spirited Thai restaurant where Jiyugaoka's cosmopolitan character, Bangkok dining culture, Thai culinary tradition and intimate hospitality converge inside the original address of a homegrown restaurant group.
Set along a compact lane near Gakuen-dori and just steps from Jiyugaoka Station, the second-floor restaurant unfolds across 29 seats with nine counter positions and 20 table seats. The interior draws from Western-style residences built in Bangkok during the early twentieth century, pairing Thai decorative elements with the domestic proportions of an old private house. Thai chefs with experience in prominent hotels across Thailand work through curries, stir-fries, salads and regional preparations in a room deliberately scaled for close communal dining. The result is an intimate Jiyugaoka restaurant where Bangkok architectural references and Thai-led cooking bring the warmth of a private gathering to the center of the neighborhood.
What you should know about Krung Siam.
Krung Siam is best known for opening in Jiyugaoka on November 19, 2004 as the first restaurant created by Hiroshi Kawaguchi after an unusual career that carried him from Japanese diplomacy into professional Thai kitchens. Kawaguchi graduated from university in 1992, joined Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and spent 11 years in government service, including three years in Syria and four in Oman, before resigning in 2003. He entered the kitchen at Tinun Shimbashi, trained there for ten months and continued learning restaurant operations at Bamiyan and Cafe La BohΓ¨me before launching Krung Siam the following autumn. SUUγ»SUUγ»CHAIYOO subsequently expanded the concept to Kichijoji in 2008, Roppongi in 2009 and Nakameguro in 2010, building a broader Thai restaurant business from the Jiyugaoka starting point. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries honored the company in 2018 with a Food Industry Affairs Bureau Director-General Award in the New Business Format and Human Resources Development category; at that point SUUγ»SUUγ»CHAIYOO operated 13 restaurants with 180 employees and Β₯919 million in sales.
Kawaguchi extended the company back into Thailand in 2017 with a Bangkok Phrom Phong restaurant, taking a Japanese-founded Thai restaurant business into the country that had inspired it. Staffing became another major component of the company's development: by the 2018 agriculture-ministry award, more than half of employees were Thai, with company support covering practical aspects of relocation to Japan. A βSuper Cookβ system placed selected kitchen leaders across operating areas to oversee recipes and cooking procedures, creating an internal mechanism for maintaining culinary standards as the restaurant portfolio expanded. The business later entered agriculture in Ichihara, Chiba, in 2022, cultivating Thai herbs, vegetables and rice with organic methods incorporating elephant manure; those herbs now supply the company's cooking. The original Jiyugaoka restaurant now stands at the beginning of a business spanning nine current Krung Siam locations across the Kanto region, including Azabudai and Haneda Airport.
How to fold Krung Siam into your trip.
Krung Siam works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing how education, postwar commerce and neighborhood reinvention created the cultural and commercial character that distinguishes Jiyugaoka.
Begin at Jiyugaoka Kumano Shrine, guardian of the former Yabata area, where a Kumano cult connection predates the Kamakura period, an 1823 red torii survives in the precinct and the present main sanctuary dates to a 1909 reconstruction. Continue to Jiyugaoka Department Store, where a postwar street market organized in 1948 became a reinforced-concrete commercial building in 1953, preserving the small independent merchants that drove the station quarter's reconstruction. Conclude along Kuhonbutsu River Greenway, created after the river was culverted during the 1970s and substantially upgraded by 1992, when underground utility work helped convert the former watercourse into one of the district's principal pedestrian spaces. The progression moves from Yabata's medieval religious inheritance through the merchant-led rebuilding of 1953 into the conversion of former river infrastructure, revealing three distinct stages in Jiyugaoka's development.
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