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FAQS & GLOSSARY
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About David Thompson
They say that to understand who you are, you need to understand where you came from, and for Long Chim, that means we need to talk about David Thompson.
Born and bred in Sydney Australia, it was 1986 when a young David Thompson travelled to Thailand where he instantaneously fell in the thrall of the culture and people.
“I thought Thai food was pad thai and green chicken curry. God, I was wrong!”
His discovery of Thai food has led him to a stellar career – one that has taken in immense recognition as one of the world’s most renowned chefs cooking Thai food today. From his first solo venture, Darley Street Thai (1992), back home in Sydney to his London opening Nahm, the first Thai restaurant in the world to be awarded a Michelin star, and then his Bangkok restaurant of the same name which was named Best Restaurant in Asia in 2014, his string of successes have been significant and global.
On his return to Sydney David opened Darley Street Thai in 1992, followed by Sailors Thai, a more casual restaurant, in 1995. Darley Street Thai won numerous awards, including best Thai restaurant in The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide for every year it was open.
After a move to London Nahm opened at the Halkin Hotel in 2001 to immediate critical success and was awarded a Michelin star within six months, the first Thai restaurant in the world to achieve this. Throughout this time David worked on Thai Food, his highly regarded cookbook, which provides a comprehensive overview of Thai cuisine, featuring over 300 recipes, was releases in 2002 and has won every major cookbook award.
In 2010 David opened nahm at the Metropolitan in Bangkok.
“After 20 years of cooking Thai food, it was like coming home.”
nahm Bangkok was included in the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards for seven consecutive years from 2012 to 2018, including being named the number 1 restaurant in Asia in 2014.
David’s second book, Thai Street Food, was published in 2010 and takes the
reader on a journey into the streets and markets of Bangkok and beyond. This book was the genesis for a restaurant concept you may have heard of…… Long Chim.
An excerpt from ‘Thai Food’ by David Thompson
I first went to Thailand by mistake, but it was a mistake I have never regretted. A holiday plan had to be changed at the last minute, and I ended up in Bangkok. There I basked in the agreeable life of this exotic land, and quickly became seduced by the people, their culture and cuisine. What enamoured me most was the easy and open-hearted hospitality of the Thai people. Coy and playful, proud yet reserved, they approached life and the world in a very distinct way.
Thailand has a majestic past, with all the travails that ancient cultures are heir to, yet the Thai are not overwhelmed by their legacy. The past sits very happily with the present in Thailand, and the Thai live easily with both. I resolved to live there.
Within a year I moved to Bangkok. The reality of living in this sprawling city was vastly different from my holiday in the sun. I recognised that the grace with which the Thai have adapted to the stresses of the modern world was admirable. Within two or three generations they had left their paddies to embrace the tumult of urban existence and had successfully done so while maintaining aspects of their traditional culture.
I soon had the good fortune to meet someone who would have an enormous influence on me: Sombat Janphetchara, affectionately called Khun Yai, ‘Grandmother’. She was the wife of a high-ranking bureaucrat and the daughter of a kon chao wang - a person who lived in a palace. She was thus an heir to Thailand’s ancient tradition of cooking, where fine craftsmanship and sharply honed skills were prime considerations.
Her cooking transformed my understanding of Thai food, arharn thai. Before then I had considered it an agreeable cuisine, but in her hands the agreeable became extraordinary. She cooked in the old-fashioned Siamese manner, where the best ingredients are assembled, then deftly cleaned, sliced or pounded before being combined and seasoned with an adroit cast of the hand. Her approach to cooking was instinctive; she disregarded cautious weighing and measuring, along with the dictates of any recipe, preferring to follow her own experience and taste. Her cooking was truly unique.
Initially I was disconcerted by such a loose approach to cooking, having trained for some years in the more rigorous discipline of French cuisine. But soon I began to appreciate that hers was not a culinary bedlam, but a responsive and intimate way of cooking and seasoning. I became a convert.
I cooked for several months with Khun Yai - pounding pastes with a mortar and pestle, sweating over woks, sneezing over curries - and slowly began to gain some insight into this remarkable cuisine. I tried to analyse it with a keenness that only a convert can have. But I was uncertain of my grasp.
There is a custom, unique I believe to Thailand, of having memorial books published and distributed at the cremation of the deceased. Such books record their family, their genealogy (if noble), their life and achievements, their habits and interests. This practice dates back to the cremation of one of the major wives of King Rama V in 1881. At a time when there were few books in the country, the king expressed his wish that this example might encourage people to publish accounts of the Siamese.
When books were published for women, particularly ones who had lived in palaces, they often included a wealth of recipes. I avidly read these funeral books and from such sources I began to gain a more solid understanding of Thailand’s remarkably complex cuisine.