Thai restaurants, it seems, are like buses. You wait ages for one, then several come along at once. Next week sees the opening of both Long Chim and AngloThai in the West End, while in the past 12 months Kolae has launched in Borough Market and Koyn Thai in Mayfair. Thai food hasn’t been this ubiquitous in London since it first made a splash in the 1990s. Yet perhaps we don’t need to think too deeply for the reasons behind its current resurgence.
“Thai food just tastes so bloody good,” says David Thompson, the chef and co-founder of Long Chim (36-40 Rupert Street, W1D 6DW, longchim.london). “It has an intensity of flavour and an exquisite balance of taste that just sings, wherever in the world you might be. Thai people value their stomachs and their souls, and they tend to both with equal care.”
Thompson should know: he’s been married to his Thai husband, Tanongsak Yordwai, since 1988. Yordwai is a pastry chef who was also his business partner in Nahm, the Bangkok restaurant Thompson opened in 2010 after nine years of operating Nahm at the Halkin hotel in Belgravia. The London Nahm, which Thompson closed in 2012, was the first Thai restaurant in the world to win a Michelin star; its Bangkok equivalent was named as the best restaurant in Asia by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards in 2014.
Now Thompson is bringing the more casual Long Chim, which also has three outposts in Thompson’s native Australia, to the UK. But the London Long Chim, which Thompson describes as “a long-term residency”, is not simply a carbon copy of the Sydney, Perth and Gold Coast restaurants.
“It will be a bit more refined,” Thompson tells me among the wall murals, bottle cabinets, neon signs and projection art of the Soho dining room. “As the restaurant has evolved over the nine years since I opened in Singapore, I’ve simplified the menu. Here in London it will be quite tight and focused on around 20 dishes.” The Bangkok-style street food might include beef skewers with tamarind and pepper, monkfish curry with cucumber relish and sweet and crispy five-spice pork.
Thompson will be importing ingredients direct from Thailand, which he says is cheaper than buying from suppliers in the UK, and is speaking to restaurateurs such as Som Saa’s Andy Oliver with the aim of improving the overall quality of ingredients available in London’s Thai restaurants. “I prefer to have friends in the industry, not competition,” Thompson says.
His first experience of London was consulting on the launch menu of Busaba Eathai, the Thai chain opened in 1999 by Wagamama and Hakkasan founder Alan Yau. What does Thompson think of the 2020s wave of Thai restaurants in London? “I don’t eat Thai food when I’m abroad. It feels like a busman’s holiday.” He does, however, namecheck Som Saa (43A Commercial Street, E1 6BD, somsaa.com), Smoking Goat (64 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6JJ, smokinggoatbar.com) and Kiln (58 Brewer Street, W1F 9TL, kilnsoho.com) as places he knows are doing “a splendid job”. How does he know? “The chefs were all introduced to Thai food through me.”
One of those chefs is John Chantarasak, who is opening AngloThai (22-24 Seymour Place, W1H 7NL, anglothai.co.uk) with his sommelier wife Desiree on November 11, one day before Long Chim launches. Chantarasak was born in Liverpool to a Thai father and English mother. He undertook a diploma in French cuisine at Le Cordon Bleu cookery school in his dad’s home city of Bangkok before working at Nahm — “so I had this crossover of learning classical techniques and the Escoffier-style regimented kitchen while being exposed to a very wide larder in terms of Thai dishes I’d never cooked before and techniques that I’d never seen before.”
AngloThai will likewise expose Londoners to something new, at least for those diners who haven’t followed Chantarasak on his four-year journey of pop-ups and residencies — “like doing hundreds of miniature stages” — before finding a permanent home near Marble Arch. As the name hints, the AngloThai approach is to apply Thai technique to British ingredients in dishes such as monkfish jungle curry with holy basil, using Suffolk-grown herbs. Coconuts are imported, but the coconut cream pressed on site.“AngloThai represents me perfectly as a chef because I'm able to touch on both my Thai heritage and my British upbringing,” he says.
It is certainly a far cry from the 1990s, when Thai food’s affinity with beer made it a mainstay of British pubs. “People were exposed to a very small number of dishes and a very anglicised, touristy version of those dishes,” Chantarasak says. “I think for a lot of people, that is still their reference point for Thai cuisine: claggy coconut green curries and too-sweet pad Thais. But that’s one per cent of the dishes that exist in Thailand.”
It is a view shared by Rose Chalalai Singh, the Bangkok-born, Paris-based chef who opened Koyn Thai (38 Grosvenor Street, W1K 4QA, koynrestaurants.com) in the basement of Samyukta Nair’s Mayfair Japanese Koyn in June. “So many places in London miss out on the depth and complexity of Thai cooking,” Chalalai Singh says. “At Koyn Thai we have kept the menu short and focused on refining each dish, beginning with ensuring we are sourcing traditional ingredients.”
She’s been helped, too, by Londoners’ willingness to try new things. “Parisians don’t eat much pork or spicy food, whereas London diners are more open to different flavours and spices,” she says. “That allows chefs to be authentic with the ingredients they use to enhance the flavours of the food.” Dishes at Koyn Thai include yellow crab curry, a Chiang Mai pork platter and a stir-fry of white cabbage. “Many Thai restaurants in London don’t feature traditional dishes and tend to err towards the more modern and fusion iterations of the cuisine,” Chalalai Singh says. “We’re reintroducing guests to authentic Thai flavours that feel new to them, yet are steeped in tradition.”
Chalalai Singh attributes the lack of authenticity in part to London’s relatively small Thai community, and also says that many Thai restaurants are not owned by Thai people — though she believes that the most important qualification for any Thai chef is to have spent time in Thailand itself.
“To understand how to cook authentic Thai food, you need to spend time in the different regions and villages in Thailand and with the locals, so often I feel that Thai people are naturally the masters of Thai cooking. However, I know some brilliant non-Thai chefs who have dedicated years to exploring Thailand and immersing themselves in the country’s lifestyles and traditions, and are producing some of the best food in London.”
Luke Farrell, the founder of Plaza Khao Gaeng (103-105 New Oxford Street, WC1A 1DB, plazakhaogaeng.com) and Speedboat Bar (30 Rupert Street, W1D 6DL, speedboatbar.co.uk), has spent almost 20 years living in Thailand. Ben Chapman travelled extensively in rural Thailand before opening Kiln, his charcoal-grill follow-up to Smoking Goat. Andy Oliver spent six months working at Bo.lan, one of the most lauded restaurants in Bangkok, and visiting Thailand every year before opening Som Saa in 2016. He launched Kolae (6 Park Street, SE1 9AB, kolae.com) in October 2023. How does he think Thai food in London has changed in those intervening years?
“Thai food in London is still catching up, but we’re now at a place where diners are more amendable to a specifically regional restaurant,” he says. ‘Opening a restaurant like Kolae, which specialises in grilled food from southern Thailand, feels like less of a leap than it might have done seven years ago.”
Oliver thinks that what is happening to Thai food in London is similar to what St John did for British cooking or the River Cafe for Italian: a process of both simplifying and specialising and, he says, “a move away from fancy cheffing”. Might, though, diners who remember David Thompson’s Michelin-starred cooking at Nahm be disappointed by the chef’s more informal cooking at Long Chim? “Eat it and find out,” he says. Either way, there has never been a better time to eat Thai food in London.
