A note on the words: gaprao (or gapao) is the Thai stir-fry of minced meat with holy basil and chili, served over rice with a fried egg; khao means rice, and sin here is the beef version. Pho noodles are the flat rice noodles used in the Vietnamese soup, and Thai kitchens use them too. Prices are as of this writing (August 2026).
Table of Contents hide
Ban Hao 3 on AutoReserve (English) — opening hours, payment details and the Japanese address are kept up to date there, not here.
I want to eat something good today too. This is Hangover Meshi. This time to Ban Hao 3, a Thai place in Kami-Itabashi. They have frozen dishes for sale out front, and I thought that if they were good I might buy some another time, so I went for lunch to find out what the food is like. At lunchtime there were a few customers scattered about inside. Walking in, the smell of Thai cooking drifts over you.
Then I opened the menu and got a shock. There are a huge number of lunch dishes.
Twenty-seven in total. You could come every day for a month and eat something different. Remarkable. And on top of that you can change the heat level of each dish and choose your meat from pork, beef or chicken. So the repertoire runs well past twenty-seven.
You order by reading the QR code on the table. I like this sort of thing — it feels casual.
Order placed, I go to collect the fresh spring rolls and soup that come with lunch.
They sit under plastic wrap in the middle of the restaurant, self-service. One spring roll per person. The soup, apparently, is free refills.
Fresh spring rolls packed with vegetables. Rather like a lunch salad.
Chili sauce comes separately, so you dip them in that. Yes, good.
And what I ordered this time was the Ban Hao ramen. The spicy, heavily spiced bowl that carries the restaurant’s own name.
You can set it anywhere from heat level 5 to heat level 14, but even the lowest, level 5, is quite hot. Just as the description on the menu says, the broth is very spicy, and there is depth inside the heat. Plenty of pepper coming through as well. The crunch of the raw bean sprouts you get in Thai food, the freshness of the cilantro, the richness of the minced meat miso and the heat of the broth all come together. Delicious.
The noodles are pho noodles. Thanks to those lighter noodles, hot as it is, the bowl ends up easy to slurp down. I see — this is properly authentic and very good.
I had a bite of this one, and it is a solid gaprao. The sauce is good, so it must go well with rice. You can choose chicken, pork or beef, and this time pork had been chosen. Gaprao rice has a strong chicken image, does it not. Thinly sliced pork turns out to be perfectly good too.
So, my first time eating here, and it is authentic and extremely good. This Thai place is a real find. There is a freezer out front selling frozen gaprao sauce and dishes, so perhaps next time I will buy some and eat it at home. Having a place this close with a menu big enough that you never tire of it is genuinely enviable.
Ban Hao 3 (Asian / Ethnic / Kami-Itabashi Station, Tobu-Nerima Station)
Tabelog lunch rating ★★★☆☆ 3.5
I ate here and paid for it myself. Nothing on this site is a comped meal.
One more for the road?
