Thai restaurant Chachawan will serve Isaan's extra-hot dishes
Chef Adam Cliff's new restaurant focuses on the fiery cuisine of Thailand's northeast. He tells Mischa Moselle why he likes to keep it simple
Adam Cliff says the food at his new restaurant, Chachawan-Isaan Thai and Bar, will be "very spicy". And this is a chef who knows his spices, having worked at some highly successful Thai restaurants. Most recently, Cliff reopened Kha in Singapore, having worked at the contemporary and innovative Bo.lan in Bangkok before that.
Cliff also cooked for David Thompson, arguably the world's most highly rated Thai cuisine chef, and a chronicler of the cuisine. He worked at Thompson's Sailors Thai in Sydney, and the London and Bangkok branches of Nahm. Now, aged 26, he's moving to Hong Kong to launch Chachawan for restaurateur Yenn Wong.
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It's not a bad track record for someone who started cooking on a whim. After leaving school at 16, Cliff found himself walking past a restaurant advertising for staff, so he went in and applied for a job. A week's trial at the establishment started his professional cooking career.
Later, he decided to specialise in Thai food, as he had fallen in love with the cuisine while on holiday in Thailand.
At Chachawan he will be serving the food of northeastern Thailand, or Isaan. The cuisine, according to Thompson's classic book, Thai Food, is not one of great complexity or diverse flavours, "but it is distinctive. Northeastern food is hot, very hot." It's also quite salty, and uses little or no coconut milk.
Isaan is a region bounded by mountains and split by river systems. As the rivers flow towards the borders with Laos, Cambodia and southern Vietnam, the inhabitants have more in common with those countries than with the Thais of the Central Plains area around Bangkok.