What is Thai Coconut?
Thai Coconut is the kind of restaurant a neighborhood keeps to itself until the reviews give it away. It occupies Suite 101 at 7116 E Mercer Lane, in the Sundown Plaza strip a few doors west of Scottsdale Road between Cactus and Thunderbird, in the 85254 ZIP that carries a Scottsdale address on the Phoenix side of the line (see our note on Scottsdale ZIP codes). The earliest reviews we can find date from October and November 2018, and one of them describes a brand-new Thai restaurant whose chef is the owner. We take 2018 as the opening year; the press we found does not record a month.
The restaurant describes itself as woman-owned and family-run, and that is what you see: an open kitchen with the owner at the wok, a relative at the counter, and a dining room of about six tables. There is no bar and no alcohol. The menu is the traditional Thai-American repertoire, curries, noodles, fried rice, stir-fries and salads, cooked to order with no added MSG, which the website puts in capital letters, and with an unusually long vegan and vegetarian list. The two dishes the restaurant calls its specialties are the avocado green curry and the chu chee salmon, a salmon fillet in a thick red curry sauce.
Prices are the other story. On the last menu published online, almost every noodle, curry and stir-fry was $10.95, with the specialties topping out at $13.95. That, plus the room, is why so much of the business is takeout; DoorDash rates it 4.8 on more than 200 orders, and Yelp has it at 4.7 across nearly 600 reviews, as high as any Thai restaurant with a Scottsdale address. Neighbors on Nextdoor have voted it a Neighborhood Fave every year from 2022 through 2025.
Who is it for? People who live in the Cactus Corridor and the blocks west of Scottsdale Road, and anyone who prefers a $12 curry from a family kitchen to a $24 one from a designed room on Shea Boulevard. Our verdict: the best value in Thai food on the Scottsdale Road corridor, with the understanding that you may be eating it at home.
Ordering at Thai Coconut
Start with the specialties. The avocado green curry ($12.95) is the dish regulars name first, a standard green curry made richer with sliced avocado; the chu chee salmon ($13.95) is the other house plate, and the menu lists a curry noodle bowl and a larb salmon at the same tier. Among the $10.95 standards, reviewers come back to the spicy eggplant with chicken, the masaman and panang curries, the pad see ew and the drunken noodles. The avocado fresh rolls ($6.95) and the Thai sausage ($9.95) are the starters worth the table space; the chicken satay ($7.95) comes with a peanut sauce the kitchen makes itself.
Mind the hours. The restaurant is closed Monday. Tuesday through Thursday it serves 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 4 to 8 p.m., Friday the same lunch and 4 to 9 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday noon to 9 p.m., by its own website; some listings show the weekend starting at 3, so call (480) 699-7759 before a Saturday lunch. The weekday break between 2:30 and 4 is real. Lunch specials run on weekdays and are the best deal on the menu.
Expect to wait, or take it home. Six tables fill by 6 p.m. on a Friday, and the kitchen is cooking for the delivery apps at the same time. Order ahead for pickup; the food travels well, curries especially. If you eat in, the open kitchen and the ceiling fans are the ambiance, and the room is cleaner and quieter than the strip mall outside suggests.
What to drink. There is no beer or wine license, so the drinks are Thai iced tea and iced coffee ($3) and a fresh young coconut ($3.95), which suits the name. Finish with coconut ice cream ($4.50) or the fried banana with ice cream ($7.95); mango sticky rice appears when mangoes do.
Getting there and who is there. The strip lot is free and rarely full. The crowd is the neighborhood: families from the 85254 blocks, winter visitors from the condos along Scottsdale Road, and office workers at lunch. For a Thai dinner with a bar, a bigger room and a reservation, Malee’s Thai Bistro in Old Town is the other end of the scale; this is the one you go to on a Tuesday.
The strip-mall Thai kitchen that the apps made famous
Scottsdale’s Thai restaurants fall into two generations. The first were dining rooms: Malee’s on Main Street from 1987, with tablecloths and a wine list, and the rooms that copied it. The second generation, which arrived with the 2010s, was built on cheaper rent and smartphones: small family kitchens in strip centers along Scottsdale Road, Shea and the 101, selling most of their food in boxes and living or dying on their star ratings. Thai Coconut, opened in 2018 in a six-table suite in the Sundown Plaza, is the clearest Scottsdale example of the second kind, and one of the most successful.
The record on it is thin, which is itself the story. No newspaper covered its opening. The restaurant’s website has no about page, names no owner and gives no date; the facts above come from its menu, its hours, its listings and several hundred customer reviews, the earliest from the fall of 2018. We know from those that the chef is the owner, that the business is woman-owned and family-run, and that the same handful of dishes, the avocado green curry, the spicy eggplant, the pad see ew and the masaman, come up year after year. A December 2023 review on the Scottsdale Restaurants site called it a must-visit; Nextdoor’s neighbors gave it their Neighborhood Fave award four years running, from 2022 through 2025. That is the press.
What it has instead of press is the 2020s economy of small restaurants: a 4.7 on Yelp, a 4.8 on DoorDash, and a lot of Tuesday-night orders from the subdivisions between Cactus and Thunderbird. The pandemic years, which emptied dining rooms on Scottsdale Road, suited a place that was already mostly takeout, and it came out the other side with its hours trimmed (Mondays closed, a weekday afternoon break) and its reputation grown.
Honest assessment: Thai Coconut is a very good neighborhood Thai kitchen, not a destination, and the difference matters. The room is tiny, the fans are loud, the hours are quirky and there is nothing to drink. The food is fresh, consistent and about half the price of the Thai rooms a few miles east, and the avocado green curry is a real dish, not a gimmick. If you live within ten minutes of Scottsdale and Cactus, it belongs in your rotation. If you are visiting, order it to your room.