Some dishes are standardized classics, while others are from family recipes. And though I was late to the party, I’m happy to join the crowd. The reviews and word-of-mouth have been almost universally raves. So Kin Khao is neither a chef-driven restaurant nor an especially creative one, in that the food is traditional if it’s unusual in the States, it’s because it’s largely home cooking. (Techamuanvivit has another link to Manresa: Her boyfriend is its head chef, David Kinch.) Gaines never imagined cooking Thai food, but after a visit to Bangkok with Kinch and Techamuanvivit, he thought it would be a once-in-a-lifetime project, though he now thinks of himself as more translator than chef. The chef is Mike Gaines, who cooked at the widely praised Manresa, a modernist restaurant in Los Gatos that has been closed temporarily because of a fire. Five years ago, she said, “I was around such beautiful fruits, from amazing exotic citrus to gorgeous heirloom stone fruits, I thought I’d learn how to make jam.” She won both praise and Good Food Awards for the products, but the “glorified hobby,” as she calls it, made “barely enough to finance my shoe habit.” At some point during her eight years in Silicon Valley, she began her own food blog but stopped when she felt it had become too common. I just didn’t know how.” Because she “wanted to avoid being branded as a ‘Thai’ cook,” her route to Kin Khao was circuitous. As she said when I visited her at Kin Khao, her eight-month-old Thai restaurant near Union Square in San Francisco: “I always wanted to do food. The skills appear to have set her up perfectly for opening a restaurant. Born in Bangkok in the ’70s, into a family where delicious food was cooked and showcased daily, she came to the United States in the early ’90s to study cognitive science, specifically the subject of group collaboration. Pim Techamuanvivit is an old-school restaurateur, a person who knows her cuisine inside out, but she has found an intriguing new way to run a non-European restaurant.
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