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As part of the generation that played Snake on Nokias and kept UBD street directories under car seats, I’ve had the fortune of observing the evolution of Western Australia’s Thai restaurants first-hand.

During the 80s and 90s, formal establishments such as Dusit Thai, Thai Corner and Rama Thai at the Hyatt helped introduce us to the pleasures of tom yum goong and massaman curries. Then came the cuisine’s smart-casual phase when, courtesy of the proliferation of suburban Thai restaurants and homegrown success story Hans Cafe, green curry chicken and pad Thai infiltrated our work lunch and date night rotations.

Circa 2025, Thai food is deep in its street food era. After bingeing all the food vlogs and wandering the back alleys of Bangkok, eaters hankering for uncensored Siamese flavours make beelines for Long Chim, Baan Baan, Ma Kin Thai and any other address serving noodles, soups and grilled things buzzing with the immediacy and urgency of Thailand’s roadside diners.

One of the newer admissions to this Thai restaurant fraternity is Six Streets, a sleek, contemporary 50-seater that opened in February at Karawara’s Village Green shopping centre. The skeleton of a wooden cupboard hangs overhead like an abstract art mobile. Glass panels offer views of the open kitchen. Garlands of golden marigold – a Thai symbol of good luck and prosperity – hang throughout.

It’s a smart, considered aesthetic that chimes with the aspirations of the restaurant’s parent group, Six Senses (no connection to the luxury hotel group). But whereas its mothership occupies the special occasion, lets-get-a-babysitter end of the market, Six Streets keeps the cooking straighter, speedier and more casual. It’s the kind of place that you tackle with friends, order and pay for food individually and feel confident that you’ll be out within the hour.

I’ve spent the last month giving the menu a good shake and have dined alongside families, groups of office workmates, plus students from the nearby colleges and university. The offer of snappy sub-$20 lunch specials, unsurprisingly, draws a crowd during the middle of the day.

Good value aside, Six Streets’ other attraction is its roll call of Siamese dishes not typically found in Perth. Dishes such as mookata: a hotplate-slash-hotpot hybrid that lets diners barbecue and boil simultaneously. Six Streets wasn’t the first Perth restaurant to serve mookata – Bangkok Brothers beat it to the flag – but that doesn’t make the communal cooking and eating experience any less fun, the fat from your grilled pork and beef running into the soup for maximum deliciousness. A straight hotpot (jimjoom) is also available.

Together with your choice of protein, each set includes a basket of vegetables (the menu doesn’t mention this, so don’t add veg to your order as I did initially) plus a trio of ace nam jim dipping sauces featuring heat, salt and acid in varying ratios. The best-on-ground? That’d be the verdant nam jim seafood, an electrifying blend of garlic, coriander, green chilli and lime.

Six Streets is also one of Perth’s only places doing gai yang, Thai barbecued chicken. The birds here might not be as heavily spiced as the (slightly smaller) chickens over at Vic Park’s Bangkok Street Thai Bistro, but they’re still juicy of flesh, gently caramelised of skin and a splendid shared dish. Speaking of grilled meat: the chicken satay is of the sanitised, meet-the-parents variety rather than fiercely charred – it’s still good eating – while skewers of moo ping (grilled pork) are fatty and sweet in all the appropriate places.

Chef Aum Ronnachai’s team know their way around a wok. The rice noodles in the ubiquitous pad thai are taut and smoky; the crab fried rice hums with a similar vitality. Based on the unctuousness of the khao sai – Chiang Mai’s legendary curry noodles – and the Southern Thai-inspired yellow crab curry, the kitchen is equally fond of its coconut cream, too.

Some will dig this stylistic choice, others might want to utilise the khrueang phrung (condiment caddies cradling crushed chilli, fish sauce, sugar and white vinegar doctored with fresh chilli) to brighten up their bowl. No such fine-tuning needed, however, for the tom saab beef: a zippy broth sharp with lemongrass and makrut lime leaf and a timely reminder that the realms of Thai soup beyond (the admittedly excellent) tom yum warrant further exploring.

A menu this vast, naturally, has shortcomings. Shredding the green papaya for som tum too finely has robbed the salad of crunch and life force; skeins of lacklustre kanom jeen are a disservice to the glory of Thailand’s indigenous fermented rice noodles. A single hotpot and its entourage of ingredients and sauces can quickly overrun a table for two: be prepared to pull up a chair for stashing overflow and extraneous dishes.

Then again, this sort of chaos and abundance is commonplace when eating and drinking streetside in Asia: why not embrace it? The madness and bustle of Sukhumvit, Yaowarat and other key Bangkok neighbourhoods are so far away. With the arrival of Six Streets, eaters have another go-to for their Thai street food hit-lists.