RESTAURANT NEWS | WISCONSIN

Modern Thai Restaurant WELA Arrives in Milwaukee's Historic Third Ward

WELA pairs French technique with house-made curries, Phuket-style pork belly, and a whole branzino in two sauces.

By Jamie Dutton
5:02 a.m. CT, Oct. 14, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Jamie Dutton's job has her in airports regularly, as does a family spread out across the Midwest. She’s partial to BPTs and Bell’s.

WELA is pronounced “way-lah.” It means “time” in Thai, which makes sense with what’s happening in the kitchen. Dishes that started on family tables in Thailand have traveled, changed hands, and picked up French technique along the way, and they’ve arrived in Milwaukee still tasting like themselves.

The restaurant in the Historic Third Ward is from Nini Trick and Kim Kongsin, who are also partners in Thai-namite, along with Bigsun Phonimdaeng and chef Somchock “Sam” Sansawas. Sansawas earned a culinary degree in Thailand and cooked at Le Du, a Michelin-starred modern Thai restaurant in Bangkok, and the French technique he picked up afterward now runs quietly through his cooking. Aleesha Amador runs the front of the house.

WELA Thai Restaurant Milwaukee Crab tartlet

The menu starts small and precise. There’s a one-bite crab tartlet, with crab in a coconut reduction flavored with lemongrass and makrut lime, finished with lump crabmeat and salmon roe. Hamachi crudo pairs fish sauce with a bright apple-basil sorbet. The grilled chicken wings are deboned, seasoned with coriander, garlic, and black pepper, and stuffed with sticky rice, and a pomelo salad, modeled on the sour, spicy balance of green papaya salad, comes with a jumbo tiger prawn.

WELA Thai Restaurant Milwaukee Moo hong pork belly

Curries carry the middle of the menu. There are five, all built on house-made pastes, with a vegan option among them. Proteins borrow from a French kitchen, with confit, sous vide, and roulade all in play. The red curry pairs duck confit with pineapple, tomato, lychee, and grape, and a turmeric-forward curry holds lump crab and betel leaf. The moo hong is Phuket-style pork belly, slow-braised with five spice and stacked with pickled red onion, fried shallots, and cilantro. A whole branzino is grilled, deboned, and served with two sauces, one salty and sweet, the other spicy and sour. The beef short rib cooks sous vide for 24 hours before it’s grilled, and it arrives with three dipping sauces.

The space keeps what the building gave it, exposed Cream City brick and heavy timber beams, and layers in chartreuse banquettes, backlit wooden lattice screens, and a bar fronted in blue tile. Jared Steffen leads the bar program, which began with six cocktails and two spirit-free drinks. The cocktails are built in-house, with scratch-made infusions and syrups and spirits altered through fat washing, and the beer list looks well beyond Wisconsin.

WELA is starting with dinner service only while the team settles in, and Sansawas expects the menu to change with the seasons and, in time, to stretch into chef’s table dinners. For now, the opening menu is enough to go on. It’s Thai cooking that takes its time, in a room that asks diners to do the same.