In 2022, Luke Farrell launched a restaurant inspired by the humble raan khao gaeng - the curry-over-rice shops found in markets, food courts and transport hubs across Thailand. Perched above Arcade Food Hall on Tottenham Court Road, Plaza Khao Gaeng is the only full-service restaurant in the building and specialises in southern Thai cooking that doesn’t pull its punches when it comes to heat or intensity.
Despite its slightly unconventional location and take-it-or-leave-it attitude, the restaurant - backed by JKS Restaurants, as is Farrell’s Thai-Chinese concept Speedboat Bar - quickly struck a chord. Within a year it had picked up a Michelin Bib Gourmand and established itself as one of the capital’s most distinctive Thai offerings. In July this year a second Speedboat opened in Notting Hill and earlier this week, Farrell opened a second Plaza Khao Gaeng, this time in Borough Yards in the former Vinoteca site.
Both restaurant brands make use of Thai ingredients that Farrell grows himself within greenhouses at his Ryewater Nursery in Dorset, where he also develops and finalises his dishes before they hit the restaurants.
While much of the DNA remains the same, the Borough Yards Plaza khao Gaeng steps things up with an expanded selection of dishes that will be unfamiliar to anyone who hasn’t spent time exploring the deep south of Thailand. Most visitors stick to Bangkok, the islands or the north, but Farrell argues that the south - fiery, fragrant and famously uncompromising - deserves far more attention.
Many of Plaza Khao Gaeng’s dishes will be unfamiliar to those that haven’t been to southern Thailand. Does that ever backfire?
Yes. We do have some customers who are confused by what we’re doing. We don’t serve well-known dishes like pad Thai. Most of the Thai food in London is either pan-Thai or from the north or north-east. You don’t tend to see a lot of southern Thai food because it’s the hardest to do – it’s so reliant on fresh, often obscure ingredients that usually can only be sourced from Thailand.
It’s also very spicy…
I don’t care if people find it too spicy. I do it exactly like it is in Thailand. Part of the problem is that some of our guests don’t understand how important the rice is at Plaza Khao Gaeng. The clue is in the name (khao is the Thai word for rice, but also for meal, which speaks to the ingredient’s significance). The idea is to put some rice on your plate and then add a small amount of curry to it; it’s like a blank canvas in that sense. Sometimes people don’t eat the curry with the rice and then complain that it’s too spicy or too salty. The unseasoned rice is meant to balance the heat and salt levels of the curry.
Tell us about the new Plaza Khao Gaeng
It’s under a railway arch (the site was until recently a Vinoteca) in Borough Yards. Being near Borough Market is a great fit for Plaza Khao Gaeng because in Thailand, khao gaeng (curry-over-rice restaurants) are nearly always located close to food markets. That’s where the ingredients come from and people like to pick up a few curries after doing their morning shop. The better the curry-and-rice shop, the more plastic tables and chairs you’ll see outside. At the front, we’ve recreated a street-market scene. It looks a bit ropey, if I’m honest, but it’s taken a lot of effort to get it that way. The rear of the site is more comfortable and is inspired by one of my favourite khao gaeng restaurants in Bangkok, which is located in a disused cinema.
I don’t care if people find it too spicy. I do it exactly like it is in Thailand
Is the menu similar to the original Plaza Khao Gaeng at Arcade Food Hall, Tottenham Court Road?
The concept is roughly the same, but I’ve given my team a real headache by changing about 50% of the menu. I just can’t stop myself. There are so many exciting dishes from the south of Thailand. New dishes include naem neua tord (picanha beef fermented in-house with rice then stir-fried with lots of chilli and garlic); curry of Dorset crab with coconut milk and betel leaf; and khua kling muu (dry-wok-fried pork with chillies, long pepper and wild galangal). But the thing I hope will become a favourite is actually two distinct dishes that I want people to order together: kha muu paloh, a Thai-Chinese braised pork hock dish, and sour orange curry (gaeng som pla). It’s a great example of two different food cultures coming together and is inspired by a restaurant near a railway station in Phatthalung (a city and province in Thailand’s deep south).
We hear you’re doing a riff on Borough Market’s infamous strawberries and chocolate…
Yes. It’s a bit of a piss-take. In Thailand, strawberries are often used as a savoury ingredient. We’ll be serving ours as a salad dressed with lime juice, tamarind, roasted dried chillies and palm sugar, then finished with these amazing little dried fish we import from Thailand.
How is your growing operation going?
Well, but we haven’t made life easy for ourselves. It takes a huge amount of work to keep up with the extra demand from the new restaurants in the portfolio. I’ve had to build more greenhouses at Ryewater Nursery in Dorset, and I’m also in the process of setting up a growing operation in Portugal that will allow us to extend our growing season. Growing our own ingredients sets us apart from other Thai restaurants in London. There’s only so much Thai produce available here, and a lot of Thai restaurants end up serving similar dishes because they’re constrained by what’s available. Unlike most other high-end Thai restaurants in London, we don’t use our aromatics to make curry pastes. There are two big issues with that. Firstly, you’re paying a Western chef on a Western wage to spend hours pounding expensive imported ingredients that aren’t necessarily at their best. But secondly - and more importantly - they’re not going to do it nearly as well as a family that has been making curry paste for generations.
Do you cook in any of your restaurants?
No. After the menu has been developed and finalised in my kitchen at Ryewater Nursery, I hand it over to my team. This is because it’s not my food; it’s Thai food. It takes far more creativity to copy something perfectly than it does to come up with your own idea or add a cheffy flourish. I don’t have time for that.
Who is cooking your food, then?
These days the kitchen team is roughly half Thai across the group. The danger of having only Thai cooks is that they slip into cooking for farangs (foreigners) again. Thai people are very hospitable and want to please. If they’re told by a guest that the food is too spicy, they’ll dial it down. I want them to cook exactly as they would for their granny back home.
The danger of having only Thai cooks is that they slip into cooking for farangs (foreigners) again. Thai people are very hospitable and want to please
You recently created a sub-branded division within the wider JKS Restaurants portfolio. What does that mean for your restaurants?
The creation of Chaiyo Restaurants signals a slight separation from JKS, but we still make full use of the incredible expertise and support they bring. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without my partners taking a punt on me. Chaiyo is the last word of the Thai national anthem and it roughly means ‘rejoice’. It’s also what our team members say after every meeting. The aim of the group is to serve the true form of Thai food without compromise. Eventually, we want to offer food from every part of the country.
Does that mean the next thing you open won’t be a Plaza Khao Gaeng or a Speedboat Bar?
Maybe. I don’t want to say too much, but we’re looking at launching a Thai restaurant in a much posher part of London that will showcase the royal dishes born out of trade and different cultures coming together. This restaurant will become our flagship. We’re also planning to launch a restaurant that explores the food of the north, and another focused on the food of the north-east.