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This week’s review concerns a buzzing Thai canteen in Melbourne’s CBD where queuing is a warm-up act to dinner. But it’s not Chin Chin, the all-conquering giant on Flinders Lane that’s been turning people on to jungle curries since 2011. And it’s not Soi 38, the boat noodle and barbecue specialist tucked, like a hipster’s fever dream, inside a brutalist carpark along Mcilwraith Place. No, we’re around the corner at Thai Baan, which has arrived to introduce the top end of Bourke Street to the art of cooling your pre-dinner boots on the pavement. At 6pm on a desolate Monday night there are crowds waiting to warm their cockles with the boat noodles for which the place has become a standard-bearer.

Thai Baan owner Jirada Ponpetch has unimpeachable form. Her family has been operating an Ayutthaya (boat) noodle stall for 30 years in her native north-eastern Isan region and she has transplanted the recipe, pork blood-infused broth and all. Padded out with slippery noodles, sliced beef, tripe, minced beef balls and crunchy veg ($14.90), it makes a rich, aromatic and complex brew.

The boat noodles are the main drawcard at this colourful cafe, judging from the choice of the Thai diners occupying colourful stools, their heads poised over steaming, fragrant bowls. But the photo menu (praise be for this act of kindness to a non-Thai audience) has plenty of pulling power.

Constructing a meal here means the pursuit of balance, not just within individual dishes (that’s the kitchen’s job and chef Saifon Wichian is doing it well) but across the dizzying categories of salads, rice dishes, noodles, grilled dishes and soups on offer. It’s street food at heart, punchy and affordable.

“Thai Baan aims for fast and furious food and a take-no-prisoners attitude to authenticity.”

And while my two visits have barely scratched the surface, I can vouch for the supple slips of raw salmon ($15.90) sprinkled with the gritty fairy dust of flying fish roe and accompanied by rugged batons of green papaya, halved cherry tomatoes and raw cabbage in a salty, citrus-driven sluice. Char-marked swatches of nicely fatty pork neck ($14.90) arrive to dip into a sauce that dances at the nexus of citrussalty-sour. Despite the little chilli seeds that are scattered ominously across the top like fiery flotsam, it’s pleasantly tingle-warm rather than scud-hot.

Falling under the “salad” rubric, there’s a dish of whomping great Pacific oysters ($15.90) lurking like submarines in a crunchy rubble of fried shallots with red onion. It’s a bracing dish and, for anyone who requires the Pavlovian scrape of an oyster from its shell before consuming these great hunks, a little disconcerting until the chilli jam comes to the rescue. More approachable are the northern Thai sausages known as sai oua ($14.90), piquant with herbs and lemongrass.

The fit-out deserves a mention for the contagious kookiness that sees twinkling LED displays embedded in a wall mural of a carnival. Food is selected by way of a tick-a-box menu, which means the service is mostly reactive while being resolutely friendly. But Baan is a machine calibrated to achieve its aim: fast and furious food and a take-no-prisoners attitude to authenticity.

On each table, there’s a blue plastic caddy of condiments that can fine-tune your ride, including fish sauce and dried chilli. A box of tissues anticipates spills and sweat, while another container houses cutlery and disposable chopsticks. Cue discussions about correct Thai table etiquette.

Milky green curry – mainstay or cliché, depending on how you look at it – isn’t a thing here, but other dishes from Melbourne’s Thai playbook have a good showing. Pad Thai ($14.90) arrives in a fragrant lick of wok hei (otherwise known as the taste of the first bite of a restaurant stir-fry) that takes this old stager to new levels of enjoyment.

Thai Baan is from the Thai multiverse that has been fermenting like fish sauce in Melbourne this year (other worthy arrivals include Nora Thai in South Yarra and Pa Tong Thai in the city). They’re all part of a new wave that’s going deeper and harder, less managed for Western palates not raised on a mother’s milk of spice and funk.

It will probably broaden your horizons. It will certainly clear your nasal passages. Thai Baan is helping Melbourne’s food credentials take another leap forward. Just make sure you wear comfortable shoes.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine