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From northern Thai curry to southern Thai seafood, a new restaurant in downtown Phoenix claims a culinary tour of Thailand’s abundant, regional delicacies.
Yotaka Promtun-Martin and her spouse Alex Martin started out Lom Wong in 2019 as an personal evening meal get together in their dwelling in Scottsdale and over the yrs it has evolved to grow to be one particular of Phoenix’s most acclaimed pop-ups. Now the couple is preparing to showcase Yotaka’s relatives recipes at their to start with brick-and-mortar restaurant and cocktail bar.
Lom Wong will open up in a bungalow on Roosevelt Row that formerly housed wonderful-dining restaurant Character. Doorways are scheduled to open up in early March.
Bringing Thai household cooking to metro Phoenix
“Lom wong” interprets roughly to accumulating in a circle to eat. It is meant to evoke the heat feeling of cooking and having with a person, Yotaka explained to The Arizona Republic in 2021.
“The idea is that we cook dinner for you like you might be our spouse and children, and getting truly sincere to the men and women who have definitely honored us to prepare dinner their food stuff,” she stated. “‘My household does not say ‘hello, how are you,’ we say ‘have you eaten?'”
Yotaka grew up on her family’s farm in San Makhet, a village in northern Thailand, the place she figured out to cook dinner quite a few of the dishes that have appeared on Lom Wong’s rotating menu. She met Alex in Chiang Mai and the two began functioning collectively in the nonprofit sector, focusing on academic tourism and sustainability issues, just before relocating to Arizona.
In 2019, the couple begun hosting weekly dinners in their Scottsdale home. These dinners were place on hold for numerous months when the pandemic strike. They eased back again into things by offering takeout and inevitably returned to in-individual, outside eating.
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Regional Thai dishes are encouraged by good friends and family
The pop-up dinners at Lom Wong commonly concentrated on meals from a few different communities in Thailand.
Yotaka’s household, a tropical village positioned in Chiang Rai, is in Thailand’s northern-most province. Cooking there is a communal knowledge, where neighbors borrow ingredients from just about every other’s gardens and her household made foodstuff these kinds of as curry paste and water buffalo jerky from scratch, she explained.
The pair is also shut to Received Pen, a chef who’s like household. Her village is located in the densely forested Erawan National Park in western Thailand. Won Pen, who runs a farm and donates foodstuff to the local university, taught Alex and Yotaka some of her dishes, which includes fried chicken and a herbaceous, shrimp and lemongrass salad.
Some of Lom Wong’s dinners also lifted cash for the Moklen men and women, an Indigenous fishing community that lives on the coast of the Andaman Sea in southern Thailand. The 2004 tsunami gave the Moklen a short respite from developers that experienced taken in excess of their land, but now the Moklen are preventing once yet again for obtain to their ancestral land.
Dishes they have uncovered from their Moklen companions involve yam sai bai, a seaweed salad with curry paste, toasted coconut, green mango and anchovies.
Yotaka and Alex approach to cross-educate with their Moklen associates, who have started cafe in Thailand, and in the distant upcoming, offer you guided cooking excursions in hopes that eco-tourism can support the Moklen continue to keep their land.
The couple would like their cafe in Phoenix to really feel like a collective, a distinction to the chef-driven tradition exactly where a lone chef is presented credit history for a menu, Alex explained. In actuality, dishes pass via a lot of arms, from individuals who grow the elements to those who train their cooking procedures.
“Our goal is to be honest to the people who taught us their dishes,” Alex mentioned. “We want to do away with the ‘self.’ The extra you educate yourself, the a lot more you comprehend it is more sophisticated than what happens in the kitchen area. We do not declare possession of the menu.”
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What is actually on the menu at Lom Wong
Everything at Lom Wong will be made from scratch, from the chile paste to sauces, Alex stated.
Visitors at Lom Wong can hope a principal menu showcasing foodstuff from northern Thailand, these kinds of as sai oua, grilled sausage made with minced pork, makrut lime leaf and cilantro root nam phrik ong, a tomato and chile dip served with greens and sticky rice gaeng phet, made with hand-pounded red curry paste, coconut milk, Thai eggplant, Thai basil and beef.
Recipes will stay real to what they realized in and all around Yotaka’s village, so even a common dish like laab — a minced meat salad that’s the national dish of Laos — is well prepared in a northern Thai fashion, combined with culantro and topped with pork rinds.
Rotating menu items will alter with the seasons and the owners’ whims. This suggests diners can anticipate conventional dishes for Thai vacations and in the summer months, “foods you take in when it is hot,” like thang mo pla haeng, a watermelon and dried fish snack. Other specials envisioned to pop up include curried crab and goong chae nam pla, or raw marinated prawns.
Lom Wong will also provide Moklen specialties, these kinds of as chu bai neung boo wak now, steamed squid and squid eggs in chile, lime and makrut lime leaves.
“I want individuals to experience like they are consuming out of the place,” Yotaka reported. “I want that if my mother or Won Pen arrived in this article, they are pleased, not embarrassed.”
Spice degrees count on the dish simply because, as Yotaka and Alex demonstrate, not all Thai dishes are meant to be spicy. Part of the Lom Wong expertise is educating diners on regional dishes and diverse taste profiles, they claimed.
Gaeng hold lay, a pork stomach and tamarind curry dish that’s well known in northern Thailand, is mildly spicy in contrast to gaeng khua phrik, a pork rib curry dish from southern Thailand “that will soften your face off,” Alex discussed.
“Spice is just an factor, it is not meant to be the total detail,” he reported. “You require to be able to style the other flavors, the funk, the sour.”
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What drinks and desserts will be offered?
For dessert, diners can expect ice cream sandwiches made with Thai-model coconut milk ice cream (pronounced ai tim) sandwiched involving white bread, as very well as sufganiyot, Israeli deep-fried jelly doughnuts served with a few sauces: passionfruit strawberry, black cardamom and makrut lime leaf, and pandan custard. The notion for the sufganiyot came from Alex’s mother, who wanted to blend their family’s Jewish heritage with Thai flavors.
Thai bartender Nuthapong “Thunder” Vance will head the bar program. Vance grew up in Chiang Mai and previously blended drinks at Glai Baan, a preferred Thai restaurant in Phoenix.
Cocktails will include a twist on the piña colada dependent on the Thai soup, tom kha, which features coconut, makrut lime and lemongrass. Then there is certainly the 11 Tigers, which will get its name from a model of Thai organic combine supposed to support digestion. For the consume, the herbs are infused in vodka in which it ferments for a thirty day period ahead of serving.
Rop Nong is a gin-primarily based cocktail that Lom Wong began serving in 2019 at dinner parties. It’s made with tom yum syrup, nam prik pao, gaeng phet curry paste and Thai chile-infused ice. The flavors of Rop Nong will improve as the ice melts, he spelled out.
Just one of the cocktails represents Vance’s dwelling region of northern Thailand, the Chiang Mai province, a mountainous region with mild temperatures, is regarded for its espresso farms. The cocktail is named just after Chao Phraya, a river in Thailand, and is manufactured with bourbon-washed espresso, Phraya rum, vanilla liquer, Campari and property-designed bitters.
“What we use in cocktails are substances we use in Thai cooking,” Vance stated. “We want to symbolize in cocktails substances you can come across everywhere in Thailand.”
The building behind Lom Wong will also household Khla, a independently-owned cocktail bar being opened by Tyka Chheng, Colton Brock and John Sagasta, the team driving Newborn Boy bar at the Pemberton. Khla, which implies tiger in Khmer, will also provide Asian-influenced beverages.
“I want to make cocktails that depict me a minimal extra,” Chheng told The Republic. “I’m pleased to enjoy with elements that are lesser-recognized and bring them to the forefront.”
Lom Wong is producing a bar treats menu for Khla.
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What to count on at Lom Wong
Vance and Yotaka grew up in a area where properties had gardens in the yard and they desired to replicate that homey encounter at the cafe.
“Anytime you require one thing, like mint or basil, you can get it from your backyard,” Vance reported. “We want to symbolize that at the cafe so we can use our possess elements for cooking. We kind of make you really feel like that when you’re at the cafe, like welcome to the family.”
Vance is performing with the proprietors to set in a backyard garden with jasmine and herbs.
Lom Wong has a gentle opening scheduled for early March. The restaurant will be open up for reservations-only meal (reservations can be manufactured on line) and there are plans to increase brunch in the future.
Both indoor and entrance patio seating are available along with bar seating.
Aspects: 218 N. Portland St., Phoenix. lomwongaz.com. Abide by Lom Wong on social media at instagram.com/lomwongaz.
Attain the reporter at [email protected]. Observe @priscillatotiya on Twitter and Instagram.
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