Evening Standard
David Ellis beat a path to a restaurant “famous before its first service” from John and Desiree Chantarasak (“him the chef and her the wine head honcho”). Operated as a “travelling roadshow” for the past six years and due to go permanent as long ago as 2021, it has finally opened with backing from MJMK, the outfit behind Santiago Lastra’s nearby Kol.
It’s an expensive-looking place – “a billionaire’s beach shack” with a “Purple Rain frontage, white wood cladding and an endless collection of crockery” – costing around £75 a head for dinner (excluding drinks), whether or not you opt for the chef’s recommendation menu. John’s signature dish, a coconut ash cracker shaped much like the Michelin flower, prompted David to ask “I wonder what he’s after?”.
The cooking throughout was “thoughtful, elegant… understated but marked by a sense of absolute confidence in the kitchen”. If anything, it was a bit too understated for David, as evidenced in a massaman curry of Hebridean hogget (raised on Desiree’s family’s farm), which was “excellent if a little tame”.
The best dish came last – aubergine with sweet basil and soy-cured egg yolk, its spice “like flickering flame. They do like heat, it turns out; I only wish I’d seen it before… when bold, when John lets loose, AngloThai can astound.”
David Ellis - 2024-12-01The Guardian
Grace Dent welcomed John and Desiree Chantarasak’s decidedly elegant new venture, “where Anglo and Thai influences collide with the requisite levels of pomp and fire” for this upmarket corner of London – and without, she added, losing a sense of fun. “Addictive” hit dishes included jet-black caviar crackers in the shape of a Michelin star and wok-fired long aubergine served with dainty homemade pickles.
“The restaurant doesn’t serve rice, and instead offers up more sustainable British grains – the night we visited, the evening’s starch was barley simmered in a little lamb fat, which was rustic and really rather lovely.”
Grace Dent - 2025-01-12The Times
Giles Coren hailed the arrival of an heir to the new-wave Thai restaurants of the past decade – Smoking Goat, Kiln, Som San and co – from married couple Desiree and John Chantarasak, the latter a “hippy genius of mixed English and Thai parentage”. This heritage leaves him “free to mix Michelin-aspirant riffs on rare regional Thai delicacies with a solid roast pork lunch, without anyone batting an eyelid.”
Several of the dishes were “unreal”, not least a “staggeringly ornate, almost baroque cracker”, jet black from coconut ash, served with both brown and white crab meat as well as caviar.
“This is not a folksy local Thai in the back of a pub,” Giles concluded. “This is a beautiful, new, cutting-edge London restaurant run by lovely people, and intended very much as a destination. Make it yours.”
Giles Coren - 2025-01-26Daily Mail
Tom Parker-Bowles added his voice to the critical acclaim for this restaurant with a “family feel” from John and Desiree Chantarasak that “mixes the haute with the hearty, the traditional with the cutting edge” – noting that it is “a brave chef who opens a Thai restaurant that doesn’t serve rice”.
Not will you find fiery, pungent or fragrant larbs and curries here. Instead, “Exmoor caviar and Brixham crab, pretty as a hidden Devon cove, are served alongside a crisp black cracker, shaped like a flower and flavoured with coconut ash. The artistry is incredible, but there’s a cool purity to the flavours, the very essence of the English sea,” Tom said.
“AngloThai may be more Anglo (and French) than Thai, but this is sophisticated, ambitious, highly intelligent cooking that’s both quietly thrilling and utterly unique.”
Tom Parker Bowles - 2025-05-04
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