The woman who would become known as one of the world’s top food bloggers and go on to become one of the Bay Area’s most influential culinary stars didn’t start out working in food at all.
Yet, 17 years after the release of her first food book and nearly 12 years after opening her first Michelin-starred Thai restaurant, Kin Khao in San Francisco, Pim Techamuanvivit is sharing what she’s learned in the forthcoming “Cooking Thai” (Ten Speed Press, $40), out Tuesday, Aug. 25.
How’d all this happen? Let’s backtrack. Techamuanvivit first came to the U.S. from her home city of Bangkok to study cognitive science as a grad student in the 1990s.
She stayed to work in Silicon Valley to build collaborative work tools for IT companies like Netscape and Cisco Systems and, in 2003, launched Chez Pim, a blog combining fine dining reports, recipes and more that quickly catapulted her to international acclaim.
Techamuanvivit quit her tech job in 2005 to focus on blogging, and by 2007, The Guardian had given her the distinctive title, the “first lady of the food-sphere.” Her blog shaped the rise of more conversational food writing, drawing on recipes from old Thai cookbooks and family memories.
Building on her successes in the blog world, she went on to write a book titled “The Foodie Handbook: The (Almost) Definitive Guide to Gastronomy,” released in 2009, which cemented her reputation as a food writer and up-and-coming chef. Techamuanvivit then ran a jam business under her blog name, Chez Pim, for a time, picking up recognition at the Good Food Awards in 2012 and 2013 for her blueberry and golden raspberry and Flavor King pluot jams, respectively.
She also had a relationship with celebrity chef David Kinch known for his now-closed three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Manresa in Los Gatos, and the two were a high-profile couple who influenced the Bay Area food scene for about a decade. For instance, they were both involved with work at Love Apple Farms in Scotts Valley, considered the exclusive kitchen garden of Manresa; at one point, Chef Pim taught macaron classes there.
Eventually, a space opened up at San Francisco’s Parc 55 near Union Square, where she launched Kin Khao in 2014.
Although she learned to run her restaurant from scratch, it was only a year before Kin Khao received its first Michelin star. Fast forward to just weeks ago, and it received its 11th one-star rating in a row.
“Cooking Thai: Heritage and Modern Recipes from My Kitchen Notebooks” by Pim Techamuanvivit and Andrea Nguyen is out Aug. 25. (Courtesy of Ed Anderson/Ten Speed Press)
In the interim, she opened other restaurants: Nari in San Francisco and Nahm in Bangkok, as well as Kamin, a fast-casual spinoff of Kin Khao based in a food hall at the San Francisco International Airport. She’s also working on a “small project” in San Francisco — a noodle shop she said she isn’t ready to discuss further — and has started making wine in New Zealand that she’s planning to offer at Kin Khao and Nari.
On Tuesday, her latest project will take center stage. That’s when “Cooking Thai,” her guide to Thai cooking, built from her own tips and Thai recipes she’s collected and curated over the years, hits bookstore shelves.
We recently chatted with her to learn more about her journey. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Tell me about your path to becoming an internationally renowned chef. You started out working in Silicon Valley?
A: I’ve always loved eating. I grew up in Bangkok and had access to a lot of really amazing Thai food, which I took for granted until I got here to go to school. I liked working here and the ability to run my life outside of family constraints. It gave me this inspiration to learn more about Thai food because I didn’t have access to all the flavors that I grew up with and the dishes that I missed. At Thai restaurants (in the U.S.), everybody’s selling what people love, but there’s a little bit of sameness to it.
It became a project. When I’d go home in the summer, I would learn how to do these dishes that I missed. I would search out cooks or family or go to other houses that make this one particular dish that I loved growing up, and I would ask them to teach me how to make it.
I was writing a blog, so it was fun to learn and write about it. Eventually, I realized that no one was opening the kind of Thai restaurant that would feature these dishes, and maybe I should.
So I dove in headlong because I always felt like, and this is a privilege I have to acknowledge, a lot of early-wave Thai restaurants are faced with this business reality of having to make ends meet and having to sell the dishes that people are going to recognize and want to pay for. Whereas, when I decided that I was going to do it, it was always in the back of my mind that I’m not afraid of failure. If I fail, I’ll go back and get a proper job.
Q: What industry were you working in before you pivoted into food?
A: I was working in Silicon Valley for a couple of tech companies, and then I realized that maybe this is not really the career track I wanted to be in. At the time, I was writing a food blog. We didn’t call ourselves influencers then, but it was early, and I got noticed by a lot of media, and I figured maybe writing about food could be fun, or maybe making something. I was making jam for a couple of years. It got awards, and people wrote it up. Then it became, “Let’s open a Thai restaurant.”
When I opened Kin Khao, it was a really tight menu, mainly because the kitchen is really tight at Kin Khao. I really wanted to open something that people haven’t seen, with dishes that haven’t been available on Thai restaurant menus before; and I wanted to cook the way that I want to cook and present flavors the way that I want to. We designed the menu so that there’s a curry that is not super rip-your-face-off spicy, there’s another curry that will kind of hurt you spicy, and then there’s a vegetarian one that’s kind of in the middle. We opened with a lot of flavors and recipes that are from my family and flavors that I really, really wanted to eat.
Nari restaurant chef and owners Pim Techamuanvivit, left, and Meghan Clark, of San Francisco, look on after they were awarded with a one-Michelin-star award and Michelin jackets during the Michelin Guides International event at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland on July 18, 2023. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Q: It sounds like your approach resonated. You picked up your first Michelin star while you were recovering from cancer surgery, right?
A: The awards were within a week of my mastectomy, and I couldn’t really hang out. I showed up in a wheelchair. Yes, we got a Michelin star very quickly, a year after we opened. I obviously didn’t open this Thai restaurant for a Michelin star. It wasn’t even in the corner of my mind. But it was a validation. It was like, “Oh, somebody really liked me.”
It pushed other people to come taste it. That definitely helped us in the beginning. The fact that I was a well-known name amongst food people in San Francisco also gave us a good leg up. It was the right time, and I’m still here. It’s going to be 12 years in March next year.
There are about 11 people who are still working for me who worked for me when we first picked up our Michelin star in September 2015. That shows the kind of place we are as a place to work, because San Francisco is a very competitive market. People can go anywhere; there are so many good restaurants.
Q: Tell me more about the process of writing the cookbook. You talked about your research and digging through these old Thai cookbooks. What were some of the things you learned in this process?
A: When I ask people to show me how to make something, I write everything down because it’s important to document everything. Your brain is not going to remember all the nuance. I just started collecting notebooks and old cookbooks from anybody who wasn’t using them. I had lots between the ones that I myself wrote down and these Thai cookbooks that were published 50, 60, 70 years ago that were the first wave of published cookbooks. They were almost like personal notebooks rather than cookbooks. The measurements were not very standardized. I’d say two bahts’ — like two dollars’ — worth of coconut; and then make two cups of coconut milk out of that amount of coconut.
Here’s one book written by this aristocratic Thai woman almost 80 years ago. They’re just really fun. You can’t really cook straight from these recipes. The methods make a lot of assumptions, and you have to know what Thai cooking is, because these are basically notes that are passed down amongst families and a lot of them are quite self-referential. The first time I make a recipe out of these old books I try to stick as near to the text as I can. Then I taste it and subsequently try other things, and eventually, sometimes, it becomes a dish, or sometimes a portion becomes a dish.
Q: If you have one tip from your cookbook on Thai cooking for readers, what is it?
A: I want to encourage people to just do it. Go for it. Try making a curry paste. It’s going to open your eyes. It’s going to change the way that you think of flavors in a curry. It gives you a lot of levers you can pull to adjust it. When you buy curry paste from a jar, the only control you have is how much you’re going to use. And if you can’t really eat very spicy foods, you can just use, like, half a tablespoon instead of, like, the whole can, but then all of the flavors become muted, and you have something that is just sort of like vaguely resembling Thai curry. But the recipes in the book really teach you how to work with different types of chilies so that you get a lot of expression of the flavor, maybe without all the heat. Or if you’re allergic to shrimp and you don’t really want to try shrimp paste, you can make your own. It’s really not as complicated as you think.
When I work with cookbooks, I try to read the front matter where people explain how the recipes are put together and the ingredients. Having written my own, I realized that it’s even more important, especially because it’s a cuisine that maybe you’re not 100% familiar with. It would be so simple to just pull up a recipe and just make it. But what I really wanted to do in this book is teach you to be a better Thai cook, so we spend so much time and so much of the book explaining the ingredients and why, and how you work with chilies. Sit with it a little bit and read through some of the earlier parts. Then when you go in and you work from a recipe, it’s going to be so much clearer.
But also — when you read a recipe, and it’s all on one page, or just two paragraphs, you might think it’s easy, when a lot of times it’s not, because when you write something so short, you make a lot of assumptions about the person reading it. Unless something is really explained to you clearly, you’re making a lot of guesses. I think the more detailed a recipe is, the better it is for you. When Andrea (Nguyen, her co-author) and I worked together, I insisted that she cooked every single recipe that we worked on. So everything is really spelled out, and we don’t leave a lot of things for you to guess. So don’t be intimidated by ingredient lists or recipes that look a little bit long. It’s there to really teach you how to do it.
Author Andrea Nguyen authored “Cooking Thai,” a new cookbook out Aug. 25, with chef Pim Techamuanvivit. (Courtesy of Aubrie Pick)
And not everything in the book is difficult. There are so many recipes that are really fun and simple. But there are also some really interesting curries that you can probably make that are maybe slightly more complicated. For instance, the hunglay recipe is a pretty long recipe, and it’s for a curry that most people haven’t even seen, let alone have seen a recipe for. But the way that it’s written is that you start with the masala blend, which you can make weeks ahead of time, and then you make a curry, which you can also make a couple of weeks ahead of time. And then when it’s time to put together a recipe with the curry, it’s like opening a can. Everything is there for you.
These are really the recipes that I use personally and the recipes that we use at the restaurant, so I’m not holding secrets. I feel like it’s been such a privilege for me to be able to learn how to do these things.
Gen X, we’re the last generation that grew up in the world without the internet, right? I feel like a lot of these intricate, interesting older recipes people don’t see much these days. There are modern-day houses in Thailand where you don’t have a big kitchen out back, or people live in condominiums, and nobody has cooks or multiple helpers in the house. I was so privileged to have seen some of that, and I want to write it down and pass it on as a link in this chain.
Details: “Cooking Thai: Heritage and Modern Recipes From My Kitchen Notebooks” by Pim Techamuanvivit with Andrea Nguyen (Ten Speed Press, $40) will be published Aug. 25.
Recipes from ‘Cooking Thai’
Dining and Cooking