CENTRAL
Bangkok is known for its street food, but it’s also home to innovative and delicious fine-dining restaurants. Some of the city’s most exciting chefs tell us how they’re shaking up Thai cuisine — and their favourite hole-in-the-wall dining spots. Words: Chawadee Nualkhair
PICHAYA ‘PAM’ SOONTORNYANAKIJ
Potong Potong has wasted no time in scooping up accolades since opening in 2021, having earned not only a Michelin star but the guide’s inaugural Opening of the Year Award (2023), as well as a spot on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Driving this success is Pichaya ‘Pam’ Soontornyanakij, whose ‘progressive Thai-Chinese’ cuisine, as she calls it, combines traditional and modern techniques. “I was born into a Thai-Chinese family but my culinary training was in New York and very Western-style,” she says. “When it came to Potong, I wanted to make something more personal.”
The result is a reimagining of Thai-Chinese dishes, such as five-spiced duck, aged for 14 days and roasted for 10 minutes to create a crispy bird with “intense duck flavour”, and frog meat encased in a bamboo lattice and paired with a clear broth. It’s all served up as part of a changing 20-course tasting menu. All of this takes place within a converted shophouse — formerly the headquarters of Soontornyanakij’s family’s traditional Chinese medicine business — located on an alley in Chinatown. Above the restaurant, on the building’s top floor, is Potong’s cocktail bar, where willing guests can try a ‘cocktail omakase’ (a selection of the mixologist’s favourite creations). restaurantpotong.com
STREET-FOOD TIP: “I like Sai Nam Phueng Noodle Shop’s dry rice noodles with slowcooked chicken wings. The noodles are cooked just right, with a gooey texture and slippery mouthfeel, and the chicken wings themselves are very tasty.” Alley 392/20, between Sukhumvit Sois 18 and 20
DYLAN EITHARONG Haawm “Chefs take Thai food too seriously,” says Dylan Eitharong. “Thai food isn’t a mythical old man in the mountains who can only be accessed through meditation.” Born in Florida to a Thai father and a US mother, Eitharong came to Bangkok just before the pandemic to open Haawm, the supper club he runs from his home. With cooking for the public temporarily not an option, he used the time to deepen his Thai food knowledge.
One conclusion he reached: “Thai fine dining is a fad”. Despite that, Eitharong’s dishes — made traditionally but with a hint of cheeky ‘your grandma would never’ energy — are decidedly elegant. They include a ‘dry’ tom kha gai (coconut and galanga
