John Chantarasak: My career in Five Dishes
Almost a decade in the making, John Chantarasak’s AngloThai opened in late 2024 and, just a few months later, scooped its first Michelin star. Here, the chef shares the five dishes that have shaped his career, from Bangkok to Brixton
John Chantarasak's Five Dishes
Published: Wednesday 30th April 2025
It’s safe to say that when a restaurant launches that has been almost a decade in the making, expectations run high. John Chantarasak’s AngloThai, which finally opened in Marylebone at the tail end of 2024, surpassed its lofty expectations.
Raised in England with a Thai father and an English mother, Chantarasak’s family took food seriously. “I’ve been very fortunate to have grown up in a household where everything was freshly prepared. We had a small veg patch when I was younger, and I was lucky that there were three hot meals on the table for me and my siblings from an early age. I think I took that for granted for a long, long time, until I went to university and realised that a lot of people had been brought up on frozen meals, and they hadn’t had the same exposure to where food comes from and what food is.”
Holidays in Thailand and immersion in the way people cook and shop there helped further shape what Chantarasak calls the “osmosis” of food throughout his early childhood. All of this stacked up and, when he reached his mid-twenties and wanted to make a definitive career change, cooking seemed like the intuitive move.
What happened next is so serendipitous that it could make you believe in kismet. A conversation with a friend of Chantarasak’s from university, who was Thai, put the newly launched Le Cordon Bleu Bangkok on his radar – it was opening in the hotel owned by his friend’s family. At the same time, Chantarasak was finishing up a bucket-list road trip across the USA. “It was during the early Airbnb days, and I stayed with a young family at one point on that trip,” he tells me. “The husband was a chef and we talked about food quite a bit during the week that I stayed in their spare room. He gave me a copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. I read it and was like, yeah, this is something I’m interested in. So I came home, saw my mum, and then went straight to Thailand.”
He spent 18 months in the country, training at Le Cordon Bleu and then working at David Thompson and Prin Polsuk’s Nahm, which was top of the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list at the time. Upon returning to London, he ate at some of the city’s most exciting eateries – Restaurant Story, The Clove Club, and Lyle’s – during a 48-hour period. “It dawned on me that if I went into one of those restaurants, I would literally be at the bottom of the ladder and would have to work for quite some time to get to the top,” he tells me. “Fortuitously, David Thompson put me in touch with Andy Oliver. He was about three weeks out from opening Som Saa as a pop-up at Climpson’s Arch, which ended up being incredibly successful and catapulted the restaurant into being able to crowdfund and open a bricks-and-mortar site.”
AngloThai, in its initial stages, developed while Chantarasak was working at Som Saa. He would take holiday to cook at pop-ups across the city, slowly refining the concept and, in 2018, took the leap into launching it as a full-time endeavour. He and his wife Desiree initially planned to open a wine bar concept inspired by spaces like Newcomer Wines and P.Franco. Covid threw a spanner in that plan when they realised that if they wanted to do this, they needed to do it in a way that felt secure and scalable. At the same time, they met the owners of MJMK and, as the pandemic started to ease, conversations around partnering took place. After four years of searching for a site, the restaurant finally opened, a decade after the first AngloThai pop-up.
A lot of Thai restaurants have opened during that time – even in the last couple of years. AngloThai, though, isn’t focusing on trying to reproduce what you can eat in Thailand. Instead, Chantarasak is trying to fuse the two sides of his background into a cohesive whole, producing the dishes of his childhood and his time in Thailand, with the ingredients that are available in England. The restaurant is, in many ways, the story of Chantarasak himself.
Ma Hor
Nahm, Bangkok 2014
"Ma hor translates to ‘galloping horses’. This is something that I first encountered at Nahm. It was a signature of Thompson’s, where every single guest was served this off-menu amuse-bouche. In Thailand, it’s a piece of fresh fruit with a topping of candied meat with nuts. Usually, it’s pork and prawn which is cooked down with garlic, coriander root, sugar, and fish sauce, with crushed nuts running through it. The idea is that it’s sweet, savoury, salty and nutty. So it makes your palate come alive, and then the fresh fruit cleanses your palate. I always wanted to have a tribute to Thompson on the menu. In true AngloThai thinking, ours is centred around seasonal vegetables. Instead of fruit, we use kohlrabi, and we macerate it in a syrup made from quince. Then we cut that syrup, which is very sweet, with elderflower vinegar. Instead of meat, we take beetroot and then follow the same technique, making a paste from coriander root, garlic and white peppercorn. We cook that out and season it with British honey and soy. Then we fold through toasted rapeseeds and pumpkin seeds and garnish them with pickled radish discs and elderflower vinegar gel."
Root vegetable som tam
Salon, Brixton 2015 (first AngloThai pop-up)
"This was one of the early dishes that’s been on the menu on and off since the days of doing pop-ups ten years ago. Som tam is a very popular salad in Thailand, made from unripe green papaya. It has a very bold sauce, which is spicy, sour, salty and sweet from chillies, fish sauce, palm sugar, lime juice and tamarind. We shave seasonal British vegetables like long radishes or carrots into spaghetti strands like the green papaya. Then, depending on the seasons, we put different things through – heritage tomatoes, baby cucumbers or radishes – and we make a dressing that is predominantly made from British ingredients. We make our own fish sauce. We use honey from Glastonbury for sweetness. We use British-grown chillies, sometimes horseradish for heat. For sourness, we use a number of ingredients like gooseberries, sea buckthorn or rhubarb. Again, the idea is that hopefully you get that evocative feeling of eating som tam, but all of the ingredients are local. I think this is a dish that will always follow me along the AngloThai journey because you could take something so known in Thailand, and then apply it to all British ingredients."
Crab, caviar and coconut
AngloThai Baan, London 2021
"This was a dish that first came on the menu a few years ago when Desiree and I did a supper club series called AngloThai Baan. Baan means home in Thai. We literally opened up our home to eight guests. One of the creations that came about in those dinners was this crab dish. We take the white crab meat and dress it in fresh pressed coconut cream that we make on-site. We season that with chilli and makrut lime zest. We put that in a ramekin and cover half with caviar to give it salty opulence. The other half we cover with a sour leaf, and then spritz the leaf with a seasonal flavoured vinegar. That sits separate from the crackers, which are a very traditional style of biscuit that you find in Thailand called khanom dok jok, which means sweet lotus flower because of the shape. Then we cook down the brown crab meat so it intensifies, emulsify it with coconut cream and pipe that into the cracker. The idea is that you scoop the crab and caviar onto the cracker and when you eat it the bite explodes with more crab flavour."
Oyster, sea buckthorn and fermented chilli
AngloThai x Outcrop, London 2023
"I am a big fan of oysters. I actually came to the ingredient quite late in life. It was when I was in New Orleans during a road trip across the States where you could find cheap oyster hours and drink beers. When I started doing pop-ups and residencies, especially when I was doing tasting menus, I always felt it was a special ingredient to start meals with. Around 2017, I was invited to cook in Yangon in Myanmar. It’s quite hard to tell the story of AngloThai when you’re cooking somewhere that’s in Southeast Asia because if you buy all the usual ingredients, you’re essentially just cooking Thai food. I managed to smuggle some sea buckthorn juice out with me, and it was at that pop-up I decided to make a traditional style nam jim, but replacing the citrus juice with sea buckthorn. And then in 2023, we did a pop-up in 180 Strand and we had the oyster dish on. We made a fermented chilli base with sea buckthorn and it flew out of the kitchen. It felt right to have it on the menu here when we opened up as well."
Lion’s mane mushroom, sunflower seed satay and wild garlic
AngloThai, london 2024
"The mushroom composition of this dish is on the newer side. When we opened the restaurant here in Marylebone, two of my main focuses were vegetable dishes and the pastry section because they were my two weakest areas of the restaurant. I thought, ‘If you can’t man up and identify that and make those better, then you’re going to have a failed business’. The satay sauce is vegan, so it made sense to cook it with vegetables. But, again, this was born out of two ideas. One, my sister is allergic to nuts, so I very rarely cook with nuts anymore. And two, the desire to use a British seed to create a nutty feel. We take British sunflower seeds, roast them and then blend them into a sunflower seed butter, and then cook it out in the same technique as you would in Thailand – in fresh pressed coconut cream – and then season it with a curry paste made in-house, and honey and sugar for sweetness. It was inspired by the chicken satay skewers that you see on the street in Thailand, and wanting to create a satay sauce that was more akin to being in the UK. And now it seems to have found its way onto the menu, but created solely with vegetables."
