Bangkok’s best restaurant, Potong, takes an inventive approach to Thai-Chinese flavors, adding a modern twist to classic dishes. The Chinatown eatery earned a Michelin star in 2023. The World’s 50 Best Restaurants named Executive Chef Pichaya Soontornyanakij, or “Chef Pam,” the World’s Best Female Chef in 2025.
She named her restaurant Potong or “simple,” after her ancestors’ Chinese medicine shop.
The five-story restaurant housed a Chinese medicine dispensary and four generations of Chef Pam’s family for over 100 years. A glass-fronted elevator lifts patrons to different floors, offering a peek into the bustling kitchen. Chef Pam welcomes guests into her world through food. Each course ties back to the past to make memories for guests going forward.
Chef Pam uses the element of surprise to heighten diners’ curiosity about what they’ll be eating. She achieves this by engaging the five senses and balancing the five elements of salt, acid, spice, texture, and Maillard reaction (a chemical reaction where heats adds flavor to roast meat). Chef Pam’s multiple-course menu creates curiosity using color, texture, touch, and taste.
Potong’s Black Chicken and Soothing Broth
The first course features a black puffed pastry filled with black chicken, on a black plate, next to a black cup with chicken broth. Chef Pam intends to spark guests’ curiosity with her “black on black” dish, adding an element of surprise. Chef Pam aims to surprise guests with the number of ingredients in the dish.
“This dish contains the most ingredients of any other dish in the restaurant,” she explains. The broth is warm and comforting. Potong prepares the broth with Chinese herbs, drawing diners back to the Chinese medicine pharmacy of her ancestors.
Satay with Bread
A shallow black ceramic bowl cradles a scallop under a cover of burnt orange satay sauce. On top of the scallop is a vinaigrette with peanuts. A five-sectioned golden brioche bun accompanies the dish.
Satay is usually eaten with chicken, beef, or pork. She used scallops to create a different texture. She wants guests to interact with the dish.
“I want them to use their fingers and hands to tear the bread and dip it in the sauce,” she says. “I grew up eating satay, and usually it is served with toasted bread; that’s why I serve it with bread,” she says.
The dish has a hint of spice, with a balance of saltiness and sourness from the tamarind juice, and a sweet finish. Chef Pam wants guests to experience different flavors in each bite. “The taste depends on how much of the vinaigrette you take. Each bite has a different impact on the mouthfeel and the taste buds.”
Reinvented Pad Thai
Next is Potong restaurant’s version of Pad Thai, Thailand’s national dish: a stir fry of thin rice noodles, shrimp, egg, and tofu.
Chef Pam uses a single orange shrimp, blanketed by a thick, red, white, and blue striped rice noodle, representing the Thai flag. The flavors of the traditional Pad Thai, the sourness from the tamarind paste, the saltiness from fermented fish sauce, and the sweetness from the palm sugar come through.
“We play with the visual, the storytelling, and then the surprise element of it. We want it to taste like the original Pad Thai, which has saltiness and sweetness, and then is sour.”
Dry-Aged Duck
Potong restaurant marinates a dry-aged duck breast with five spices, partially cooks the skin with a vinegar mix, and hangs it for 14 days. The skin is extra crispy when roasted. “Usually, for my family, when there’s a celebration or birthday, we would go out and order duck. It’s considered kind of like a luxury dish. Dry-aged duck is not an everyday ingredient. It’s like a celebration.”
The duck is burnt orange on the outside, and pink and moist on the inside. The skin melts in my mouth.
A Lazy Susan displays the duck with three Thai relishes and rice. As Chef Pam says, “Seeing the duck on the Lazy Susan brings me back to eating with my cousins and family at a family gathering, so it’s the kind of course that brings you back to the ground….It’s a combination of a flavor bomb in one bite.”
Five Stories of Memories
The dessert, a coconut cream cake, brings the meal full circle. The cake has five distinct layers, embodying the shape of the building housing the restaurant.
“You can see levels that you’d been through in the building and all of the stories behind it,” she says. The sauce is savory and salty. It’s a fitting way to end the meal.
Chef Pam is surprisingly humble about her achievements.
“I don’t think I am successful yet,” she says.
Through Potong, Chef Pam showcases her Thai-Chinese family heritage and brings to life the building where her family lineage began. She proudly shares her cultural background with her guests, leaving them with lasting memories.
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Read more from Merle at Superbubbie.
