More than pad thai and tom yum soup: Thai chef’s real food quest, and why it’s hard to find the right recipes
- Bongkoch ‘Bee’ Satongun, co-founder of the Paste restaurants in Bangkok and Luang Prabang, Laos, and Asia’s Best Female Chef of 2018, is a woman on a mission
- She and her Australian chef husband, Jason Bailey, are determined to change the image of Thai food, but recreating authentic dishes is harder than it may seem
What are your childhood memories of food? “My parents had a street stall until I was 13. My mum cooked about 10 dishes per day: four curries, Thai noodles, two soups, three to four stir-fries and a chilli relish called nam prik. She would wake up at 3am and start cooking and selling food until 4pm, then go to the market to buy ingredients for the next day.
“I hated waking up at 5am to help my mother, but I had no choice. When I was five, I picked herbs for her, then after school I helped her again. While other kids were playing, I had to squeeze coconut milk and make curry paste, both by hand. When I used the mortar and pestle, the chillies got into my eyes – it’s so painful, and cutting the chillies would burn my hands.”
How did you become a chef? “I went to university and wanted to study English, but when I passed the test, I realised it was for a bachelor’s degree in English education [to teach secondary school students] – I didn’t want to face 40 teenagers every day. A friend recommended that I work in hotels so I started as a waitress and then became secretary to the F&B manager.
“I was 28 when I met Jason [Bailey]. He had his own Thai restaurant in the Australian Southern Highlands, in New South Wales, in between Sydney and Canberra. At the time, I was working at Blue Elephant [a cooking school and fine-dining restaurant offering royal Thai cuisine, in Bangkok] as a secretary. Jason wanted to learn more about royal Thai cuisine. He invited me to Australia to train in the kitchen with him, so I did, in 2005. I knew how to cook in my mum’s kitchen, but not a commercial one. Jason was hard on me. He had to train me from the beginning, and not just in the kitchen, but the whole restaurant business, too.”
So was it love at first sight? “When we first met, we felt a really strong pull; it was destiny. After a year, for visa reasons, we got married. We lived in Australia for about seven years before we came back to Thailand and opened Paste in 2012. We wanted to cook Thai food for Thai people, to show that our food is good enough for them. We thought it would be easy. But it didn’t turn out that way.”
Why? “In Bangkok there are so many restaurants, and ours is more expensive than local ones. We tried to do modern Thai cuisine at first because, in 2012, no one else was doing it, but people didn’t understand, they thought we were doing fusion Thai, which we weren’t. Then we started using traditional recipes from old cookbooks and travelled around Thailand to better understand the cuisine.