How compatible are Indian and Thai cuisines?

When I moved to Thailand I understood that there is such a huge connection between the two people in terms of language, food, mythology – even our gods are the same. After doing a little bit of reading on it, I realised with the spread of Buddhism and the Spice Route, a lot of culture from India was able to move to this part of the world. That’s why doing Indian food against this backdrop makes sense for me.

The ingredients are pretty much the same. There’s nothing you have in India that you don’t in Thailand. The north of India and northwestern Thailand were connected by the Spice Route. You can smell the dry spices in the air when you go up north, it’s that obvious. Thai cuisine in the centre doesn’t use any dry spices in their cooking but they do in the north, just like India. The vegetables, the fruits, the ecosystems are pretty much the same. Down south, the use of coconut and curry paste is exactly how we cook in India as well.

Do you have any childhood memories of cooking?

I spent a lot of time watching my dad cook in the kitchen. For the women of the house it was always a chore, but for him it was fun. He travelled a lot internationally when we were growing up so he would come back with all these crazy ingredients. Most of them I didn’t even like as a kid, but watching him have so much fun in the kitchen, that stuck with me.

He made an upside-down cake with bananas once and I was so surprised. I asked how he got the bananas inside the cake since it was upside down, and he said it was magic. Imagine for an 8-year-old girl, it was nothing short of magic. He always made it look so easy but whimsical and magical at the same time.

Has that influenced your style of cooking?

Every time he cooked, it would be something new and different. That’s how I would describe my style of cooking. It’s about giving diners something new and different every single time they eat. Every bite has to be full of surprise, has to be delightful, has to make them think. Neurons need to be firing in your brain, you need to struggle to make a frame of reference, and you need to be thinking about why, how, what and when. In that sense, he did influence the feeling I want to generate in my diners.

You also cited your grandparents as an inspiration.

I spent a lot of time growing up with my grandparents. My parents travelled a lot for work and I would stay with them for long periods of time. My life would switch over a little bit, because my grandparents and I would go to bed at 8pm and wake up at 4am every morning, when my grandmother would start cooking and then I would go to school at 7am. I would spend the first few hours with her in the kitchen.

Every morning she would get fresh milk delivered to her, so she would boil it over, collect all the fat and store it in a cold cupboard, and a couple of weeks later she would churn it. She would leave the whey in to make butter, but it was very sour because the fat has been fermenting all these weeks. She didn’t know it was fermenting or why she would do it because that’s how her mother did it, but that was the most amazing thing I ever saw. I never made the connection until I went to Europe and saw them making fermented cream and churning it into butter, and that’s what my grandmother did all the time. When I made the connection, I started thinking about all the other things she was doing. That moment when you realise you have so much in your own history… Sometimes you just need a third-person perspective to realise what you really have.

Is there any room for improvement in the Asian fine dining scene?

We need to stop aping the West. For the longest time they’ve been setting the standards for what fine dining should be, what good food is, what a wine pairing should look like, everything. We need to look into what we have as a people, what our strengths are, and play to that. If the whole world did the same kind of food, it would be such a boring place. Our civilisation is as old if not older, so I’m sure we have a lot to offer. We just have to tap into that.

What about in terms of female representation in fine dining kitchens?

Women are already here, but the point is how do you keep them? We had a breakfast with all the female chefs [at Asia’s 50 Best] and we were discussing these issues, that it’s not that women don’t come in. They choose to more so than ever, but they don’t stay. It’s a physically demanding job, it’s time away from family, and it’s a choice that you have to choose between the job or having a family, which is when women leave. Our economy and society aren’t built around the fact that women have both needs: they need to work and be productive, but they also want to have families, and our societies need to be built in a way that you don’t force women to make a choice. The moment you force them, you’re forcing them to give up the other.

We need to give it time. As more women come into positions of power, they will solve those problems one by one. This choice has been taken away from women, so I hope we can take it back.