A new little Thai restaurant in Fresno has near-perfect Yelp rating. What’s going on?

A little Thai restaurant in southeast Fresno that’s 4 months old has a 4.9 rating — out of 5 stars — on restaurant review site Yelp.com.

U-D Thai Restaurant outranks some heavy hitting fine dining restaurants in town, including Cracked Pepper Bistro and The Lime Lite.

The restaurant opened in early October serving familiar Asian food, such as drunken noodles, pho, fried rice, pad Thai and more.

Its location — on Kings Canyon near Maple Avenue — is across the street from the fairgrounds. Reviews are full of phrases such as, “Don’t let the area deter you from eating here,” and “Not the best part of town at night.”

No matter how you feel about the neighborhood or online reviews, it’s clear something is happening at this restaurant in a strip mall.

Customers are driving from Clovis to eat at U-D Thai, along with travelers stopping on their way to Yosemite and other national parks, said the owner.

And the owners have a story to tell. They moved from Thailand to Utah to Fresno and signed a lease for the restaurant before they really even knew the city.

It’s a low-key place: It doesn’t have a website or an Instagram account. And the owners say they’ve never done any advertising.

Now, some readers will be skeptical of Yelp.com reviews. One report found 20% of its reviews were fake.

Bo Srinongkhot, who owns the restaurant with her parents, said they’ve never advertised with Yelp, or offered any sort of deal to give customers a free drink if they leave a Yelp review deal.

For comparison, U-D Thai has a 4.5 rating on Google Reviews. (And it’s worth noting that its Yelp rating is based on just 35 reviews. It’s also not unusual for a new restaurant to get high reviews, possibly because friends and family are often the first to try it.)

U-D Thai

At U-D Thai, the three Srinongkhot family members are the only ones who work at the restaurant.

The family is from Udon Thani, in the north of Thailand near the border of Laos. The first two letters of the city inspired the name U-D Thai.

Srinongkhot lived there til she was 19 and the restaurant’s recipes come from that region.

“The things we make here, it’s how we eat,” she said.

Her dad Narong Srinongkhot came to the United States and ended up working at a restaurant in Hollywood and then Utah. His wife, Suphaka Srinongkhot, and daughter joined him about 10 years later.

He had a job in a factory, but he and his wife both worked in restaurants, too. When their daughter moved to Fresno, where her husband’s family is, her parents missed their two grandkids and joined her.

It’s the first time the family has owned their own restaurant. They looked at locations in Clovis and at the former The Thai House restaurant on Shaw Avenue.

U-D Thai’s current spot was affordable and seemed like a good starting point, so they grabbed it, she said.

Fresnan Selena Saiyasane was scrolling through Yelp looking for new restaurants when she decided to try it.

“Oh my god, it was so good,” she said. “I love discovering small restaurants like this.”

Saiyasane, who is Lao, did a video about the hangover food she ordered — wonton soup, drunken noodles and crab rangoon — on TikTok under the name Glazin.Asian.

She’s been back about 10 times, and says the food tasted like her dad was in the kitchen making it. She’s not bothered by the neighborhood, she said.

In a phone interview with The Bee, Saiyasane described it as a “hidden gem.”

The food

Those drunken noodles are a popular dish, made with wide, flat rice noodles, veggies and a choice of beef, pork, chicken or shrimp.

There are several theories as to how that dish got its name. There’s no alcohol in it. Bo Srinongkhot’s surmises it’s because it’s good hangover food.

Pad Thai is another a popular option, particularly for people new to Thai food. And there are several kinds of fried rice, including the basic Thai fried rice with veggies and a choice of meat.

That one is Srinongkhot’s favorite.

“For myself, I only have this in my life,” said she said of the dish.

Srinongkhot says some people may find their food a bit different than Thai food at other restaurants. U-D’s flavors are less sweet, especially in the pad Thai, for example. And the pho (the classic Vietnamese soup) is Thai style, meaning the chunks of meat are smaller, and the soup uses less oil.

It all comes from the region they’re from.

But if you like spicy, you’re in the right place, says the dad, Narong Srinongkhot.

“For me, I like to say, ‘Everything has to be spicy,’” he said.

They’ll always ask how hot you want the food for people who don’t like it that way. And after hearing about a person who sued a Thai restaurant saying the food was too spicy, he refuses to serve people off-the-charts spicy food.

He doesn’t want to get sued, he said.

Details: U-D Thai is at 4579 E. Kings Canyon Road. Hours: 10:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 10:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. 559-705-6436.