A phone call in the grey light of dawn is always unwelcome, but at least I was almost awake, down in the cold kitchen, hunched over the sports section and a mug of bitter black coffee. The previous evening had been spent on a depressing safari to grungy suburban strip malls, exploring a bunch of purportedly Thai restaurants. The food in each was the same: careless pan-Asian versions of cloying pad Thai, mango salads that were mostly iceberg and carrot, greasy fried stuff and chewy chicken satay, everything so sweet and bland. This faux Thai has become a cuisine in its own right, madly proliferating over the past few years as entrepreneurs (none of them Thai) try to copy the lucrative formula of Spring Rolls and Green Mango.

Grumbling, I picked up the phone. It was Allan Lim, the husband of Sasi Meechai-Lim, who is currently Toronto’s go-to chef if you want Thai food at your wedding or bar mitzvah. Together, they own Mengrai, a newish Thai restaurant of unusual sophistication. Lim had just picked up the message I had left earlier in the week. “Right now, Sasi and I are in northern Thailand, in a remote valley in Chiang Rai,” he said. “We’re at a restaurant called Suki on the Lotus Pond. You’d love it!” I’m quite sure he’s right. The restaurant is on a lake that’s smothered in fragrant pink lotus blossoms. Open pavilions made of bamboo and teak are built out over the water, each one seating eight to 10 guests. After dark, the glow of countless lanterns almost rivals that of the moon as it rises above the trees. Freshwater creatures are the specialty: river fish cooked in a salt crust, or “dancing shrimp” caught in the lotus pool, tipped into a bowl of hellishly spicy sauce and eaten alive.

It’s unfair to compare Toronto with Chiang Rai, but listening to Lim’s exotic descriptions, I couldn’t help it. Many Asian cuisines have been bowdlerized beyond all recognition for a western audience: the junk-Chinese chop suey menu, the food court sushi travesty, the weary clichés of the pan-Indian curry shop. But there is a particularly yawning chasm between cooking in Thailand and the Thai food in Toronto, even in our more accomplished restaurants. Instead of the dazzling intensity of chili heat, the puckering sourness of tamarind and lime, the rank saltiness of fermented fish sauce (nam pla, the great staple flavouring of Thai cuisine), dishes are muted and soothed into banality. Thai restaurateurs humbly respond that their customers prefer it that way. The chilies in many typical southern Thai dishes, they explain, would incinerate western palates. And nam pla’s decidedly ripe aroma makes Canadians wrinkle their noses in disgust, so cooks here routinely substitute soy sauce. But there has to be some reasonable and delicious middle ground between McThai and the real McCoy.

It’s hard to find a Thai restaurant in Toronto that can’t trace a root back to Young Thailand, the first Thai establishment in the city, quite possibly Canada. That pioneering establishment on Eglinton near Dufferin, which opened in 1978, set a tone and a menu that have persisted ever since. There have been six restaurants of that name over the years, all created by Wandee Young.

Young was born in Phuket but soon moved to Bangkok, where her mother opened a restaurant of sorts. “We would start cooking at four in the morning,” she says, “and have the food set outside the house by about five a.m. We’d make pad Thai, curries, chicken, vegetables, soup, stir-fried calamari. My mother’s recipes were unique—partly Phuket and partly Bangkok style.”

Young met and married a Chinese-Canadian professor who was working in Bangkok and returned with him to Toronto in 1977. “My biggest challenge was finding ingredients. There were Jamaican coconuts, mangoes and sometimes bok choy in Chinatown. I used soy sauce instead of nam pla. Italian eggplants were almost like Thai ones, though the skin was tough. But no lemon grass or lime leaf, no Thai basil or galangal. I called my mom, and she would send them with my brother or friends when they came to visit.”

Neither the restaurant nor Young’s marriage lasted very long. With a son to raise, Young found work as the chef of BamBoo, on Queen West, introducing her sweetly tangy pad Thai to a whole generation.

There was something about Thai food—especially chicken satay, shrimp soup, green mango salad and, above all, pad Thai—that captured the city’s imagination. It felt fresh and healthy with all those crunchy vegetables and torn herbs. In 1985, Globe restaurant critic Joanne Kates declared that Thai was the most interesting cuisine in town. It was certainly popular—a fresher alternative to the stale Chinese-Canadian menu—but I’m not sure it should really have been called Thai.