Chantarasak - Kin Thai: Modern Thai Recipes to Cook at Home

I was born in Liverpool to a Thai father and an English mother. I would class myself, as Im sure many will now in this modern-day Britain, as mixed race. A melting pot of different cultures, distilled into a unique individual. When I was an infant, we relocated as a family to the picturesque Wye Valley in Wales. This is where I remained throughout my childhood, before settling in London in my early twenties. Ive been fortunate in that travel was always a large part of my childhood, and this has continued into my adult life. Ive travelled and cooked across numerous continents, countries and cities, each time building my experiences, learning about and discovering countless new ingredients and cooking techniques, and forging bonds with a rich diversity of people.

Thailand has always featured in my life. When I was a child, we would travel to Bangkok to visit family and stay at my fathers childhood home, in the neighbourhood of Thong-Lor. When my family first bought land and built their home there, it was an area dominated by rice paddy fields servicing the central hub of Bangkok. Now, Thong-Lor is a bustling, modern neighbourhood with prime real estate, trendy restaurants, buzzy bars and a large multicultural population. It's unrecognisable from the land my grandparents, father and aunts grew up on. This is the story of Bangkok in the past century, a city that never sleeps and continues to modernise and grow, day by day.

Ive always loved visiting my family and friends in Bangkok. I have fond memories of eating my grandmothers cooking at the family house surrounded by my cousins, aunts and uncles. Everyone would chat away while plate after plate of amazing food was brought out to the table, with vibrant, inviting colours and wonderful aromas. Very often, I would know nothing about the dishes I was spooning into my mouth or what all the different ingredients were dancing across my tongue. I loved the mysterious nature of it all: exotic flavours that felt like the dial was turned up to eleven, sometimes almost unbearably spicy; savoury dishes with a sweetness you might normally associate with a dessert. It was truly bonkers to a curious child. We would frequently visit favourite family restaurants on these trips, often travelling hours by car just to have lunch at a specific seaside location or rural shack specialising in certain dishes not uncommon behaviour for Thai families, who cherish and value the food they eat. To this day, though, my favourite memories are of my grandmothers food. She was a wonderful cook and the flavours werent solely Thai, but also nodded to our familys distant roots in China.

My Thai family are the sort of people that wake up to a breakfast spread of broken rice porridge (jok) with various toppings, along with some leftovers from the previous nights banquet and plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. We would only be a few minutes into eating breakfast before someone would ask where we should go or what we should have for lunch, and, more importantly, Whats for dinner tonight? Food is everything to Thai people; its what they live and breathe on a daily basis, and this mentality influenced me more than I could ever have imagined as I was growing up.

In the late summer of 2013, I decided it was time to relocate to Bangkok in Thailand. This was a culmination of various life choices that had seen me leave my London office job and uproot myself from the city at the beginning of that year, before embarking on a bucket list-style road trip across the USA. During that twelve-thousand-mile, country-crossing journey of discovery, I found myself travelling, sometimes for days, to eat at certain restaurants or visit farms that I had read about. It struck me that my love for food and drink may extend further than just a hobby and that hospitality might actually be the industry I was destined for. Around this time, a chance conversation with a Thai friend brought to my attention the recently opened Le Cordon Bleu cooking school at the Dusit Thani Hotel in Bangkok. One thing led to another, and by September of that year I was there, enrolling at my first day of culinary school. Rather remarkably, I studied the Diploma de Cuisine in classical French cookery. It was a revelation: I learned about ingredients, techniques, organisation, hygiene and kitchen hierarchy. I was cooking multiple dishes a day, breaking down animal carcasses, learning to fillet all varieties of fish and working with vegetables Id never had the confidence to buy at home. I was hooked and not only that, I also discovered I was quite good at this cooking business. I found myself religiously spending hours in the school library reading cookbooks, practising dishes in my Bangkok apartment and exploring the back alleys and street markets of the city. It was during this time I also started to work in professional kitchens at the weekends and evenings outside of culinary school. To start with, I worked in French and European restaurants, but my interest in Thai food grew as I ate and discovered more about the cuisine, and I soon felt compelled to cook the food of my fathers heritage. I was given the opportunity to intern at arguably the most globally recognised Thai restaurant in the country, under the tuition of chefs David Thompson and Prin Polsuk the world-renowned Nahm. Chef David had already won many accolades at Nahm when it was based in Londons Hyde Park Corner, but had since relocated the restaurant to Bangkok, where it had been recognised as the number-one restaurant in Asia and graced the World Top 50 rankings. It was a wonderful opportunity to learn Thai cuisine from a master of his craft. It was here that my eyes and mind were really opened to Thai cuisine, and, to my shame, I realised very quickly that I knew very little about the food of Thailand and that side of my heritage.

Fortunately, I was now working within a team of dedicated Thai chefs who were eager to share their knowledge and experiences with a naive half-Thai cook who was still struggling to grasp the language and knew relatively little about this exotic cuisine. Time rolled on, and my knowledge and confidence in cooking Thai food grew. It was an exhilarating time: everything was new and fascinating, and I couldnt absorb information fast enough. When not working in the kitchen, I would explore the streets of Bangkok and obsessively read food blogs and forums about Thai food, desperate to know more. The spark had well and truly been ignited. It was a great feeling I had found my purpose.

After 18 months in Thailand, I had not only learned to cook, but had also found an identity with food. Despite this, I had reached a point where I felt it was time to return to my domestic British home. Id been away from family, friends and the world I knew for just over two and a half years, with one brief visit back to my homeland to see family. Despite loving this new-found energy and passion for cooking, I was tired from the experience exhausted in fact. All that moving around and relentless working had drained me of life and I needed to get back to the UK. I told Chef David of my intentions to return home and he was supportive, telling me that if I was not planning to return to Bangkok, then I should reach out to a former employee of his from when Nahm was based in London. That person was Andy Oliver. I met Andy back in London, and we spoke at length about Thai food and people we both knew back in Bangkok. It quickly became apparent we had much in common, and as chance should have it, Andy had been beavering away with supper clubs and events that were gaining attention and momentum. He told me about his concept of old-style Thai food cooked with a blend of Asian and British ingredients this would become the respected Thai restaurant Som Saa. I left the meeting curious about how I should approach life back in the UK. Did I plan to stay, or would I be tempted to return to Thailand and continue my education with Chef David at Nahm?