Our Story

No, no …

…we don’t have pad thai here. I don’t want to hate on pad thai because it's delicious when it’s done right. Pad thai played a huge role in putting Thailand on the world culinary map. It helped open so many doors for Thai-American immigrants. The running joke was if you know someone who’s Thai, they/their family likely worked in the Thai food business. And that was true for my family and many family friends. We owned and operated 3 Thai restaurants and one Mexican restaurant (about that later). Most of our employees were Thai immigrants. We’d serve your typical Thai food restaurant fare of pad thai, pad see-ew, fried rice, and mango sticky rice. Those dishes housed me, fed me, and got me into college and I am forever grateful. 

However, dishes like pad thai also pigeon-holed Thai cuisine into a sweet, coconut-y, and stir-fry heavy type of food. Thai restaurant fare wasn't the food we ate at home. At home, my aunt would make northern Thai food like gaeng hunglay or Thai-Chinese dishes passed down from my grandparents like guay nehk, a crispy fritter of ground pork and taro. Lucky friends who came over to my house at the right time would get to enjoy southern Thai crab curry with betel leaves with vermicelli noodles or ultra spicy southern yellow curry with catfish. I’ve always pressed my family about why they didn’t sell these dishes at the restaurant and their response would always be that Americans wouldn’t like it because they only knew pad thai. However, the Thai food market has expanded today thanks to people like Jonathan Gold, Anthony Bourdain, and establishments like Pok Pok in Portland, OR and Night+Market in LA. Americans are now demanding more “authentic” dishes and there is still so much to be discovered.