The family

One grandmother, one ledger, one neighbourhood.

Nusara

the name of the woman who taught this kitchen to cook

We cook the food of one family from one neighbourhood. The flavours stay bold and the hands stay slow, and nothing is softened to please a stranger.

Nusara carries the name of the woman who taught this kitchen to cook. She kept her recipes on loose paper tucked inside a teak cabinet, and she cooked for the monks who passed the family shophouse each dawn. Three generations later we set the same dishes on a long counter that looks out over the temple roofs, and we still pound the curry pastes by hand because she would have asked for nothing less.

We still open the doors before the lane wakes.

Cooked by hand

Pastes are pounded in granite and curries are watched by eye. Nothing leaves the kitchen the family would not serve at home.

From the neighbourhood

We buy from the temple market and the growers our grandmother trusted, by name and by season.

Heat kept honest

The chilli stays where the recipe asks for it. We will guide you through the heat, never around it.

Pim Saetang grew up at the back of the family shophouse, grinding chillies before she could reach the counter.

She cooked in Chiang Mai and along the southern coast before coming home to Bangkok to reopen her grandmother's table. She runs the kitchen the old way, by smell and by memory, and writes nothing down that the family has not cooked for fifty years.

Pim Saetang

Head Chef and Keeper of the Recipes

Three generations, kept in one kitchen.

1971

Our grandmother opens a stall feeding the monks at the temple gate.

1988

The family moves the kitchen into the shophouse above the lane.

2009

The recipes pass to the second generation, kept on the same paper.

Today

Nusara cooks from the teak cabinet at a counter above the temple roofs.

The hands at the counter.