Rapids City’s Thai Town Cafe expanding to Geneseo

Second restaurant will open in early 2025

The Thai Town Cafe, located at 403 17th St., Rapids City, Illinois, will soon expand to Geneseo, Illinois. It will open a second restaurant at the location of the current Golden Garden Chinese Restaurant. CREDIT DAVE THOMPSON

RAPIDS CITY, Illinois –  A popular restaurant in this community is already getting ready for the new year with a business expansion.

The Thai Town Cafe, located at 403 17th St., Rapids City, for the past two years, will soon open a second restaurant in Geneseo, Illinois.

The Thai Town Cafe 2 is scheduled to open in February 2025 at the current location of the Golden Garden Chinese Restaurant at 103 S. State St., Geneseo, Illinois. The current owners of the Golden Garden will retire and close the restaurant on Dec. 24. 

The new Thai Town Cafe will then move in and reopen early next year, according to Greg Kerner, one of the owners of the Thai Town Cafe in Rapids City. (Mr. Kerner along with his wife, Monthira, have owned the area restaurant for the past two years.)

Mr. Kerner announced the business expansion in an Oct. 2 video message on the Thai Town Cafe Facebook page. He called the Geneseo site a “perfect” location for the business.

“It’s all because of our customers. … You guys have made us who we are,” he said in the video.

Mr. Kerner on Thursday told the QCBJ that the scheduled February opening might be indirectly impacted by the hurricanes hitting Florida. He hopes to start renovations at the Geneseo site at the start of the year, but fears building materials might be in short supply due to rebuilding efforts in Florida after that state was hit by two hurricanes.

Long in the works

The search for a second restaurant site started almost two years ago when the Kerners opened Thai Town Cafe in Rapids City. That opening was a success, and they immediately started plans for a second business site.

“It’s been going well. It’s completely exceeded our expectations,” Mr. Kerner said on Thursday, Oct. 10.

He added that he and his wife picked Geneseo for the second location because it is a larger community in the region, and that city’s restaurant scene has been largely “focused on American food.” So, there is room for a Thai restaurant.

Once Thai Town Cafe 2 is open, it will likely offer a “different eating experience” to customers compared to the Rapids City restaurant. Mr. Kerner said the new restaurant will offer an express-style lunch with a buffet service for lunch. The dinner service will be a “more traditional restaurant service” with staff taking meal orders and delivering the food to tables, he added.

Thai Town opened at its Rapids City location in August of 2022. Before that, Greg and Monthira Kerner were serving Thai food in the region via a food truck.

In 2018, they first set up a turquoise food truck at Port Byron’s Tug Fest and made $200 the first night. “We doubled that the second night, and tripled it the third night,” Mr. Kerner told the QCBJ two years ago.

Customers flood in

Port Byron’s mayor asked them to come down to the levee twice a week. “It was a flood of people every time we were there,” Mr. Kerner added. “Sometimes people waited for an hour for their order.”

They upped their levee time to four days a week but that was too much for Mr. Kerner’s work schedule, so they moved the truck back to their Port Byron home’s driveway. When the COVID-19 shutdown began in 2019 they were able to create a drive-through and take-out window. They also set out picnic tables along with a playground for kids on their five-acre lot. 

“People still wanted to go out to eat but wanted to be away from closed dining rooms,” Monthira  Kerner told the QCBJ two years ago. In the end, they needed a place with more parking because the food truck was serving 60 carloads a day.

 They ended up at the Route 84 and 14th Street corner in Rapids City, using an adjacent building for dining space, but the kitchen was inadequate.

After that, the couple started looking for a permanent space and found the building at 403 17th St., Rapids City.

Get the free QCBJ email newsletter

Stay up-to-date with the people, companies and issues that impact business in the  Quad Cities area.