Restaurant review: Richmond’s Baan Lao Thai aims for 2 Michelin stars

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Baan Lao

Where: 4100 Bayview St, Richmond
When: Tasting menu dinners, Wednesday to Sunday. Afternoon tea, Friday to Sunday.
Info: 778-839-5711. baanlao.ca

With the Michelin Guide about to land and anoint in Vancouver on Oct. 3, I had a timely chat with two-Michelin star chef Chumpol Jangprai, from R-Haan Thai restaurant in Bangkok.

He was recently at Baan Lao to cook a collaborative Thai Royal dinner with his former student, the angelic-looking chef Nutcha Phanthoupheng, who cooks as if for royalty at her Steveston restaurant.

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And that’s literally.

She follows the perfectionist traditions of Thai Royal cuisine: arresting presentations with the best and healthiest ingredients using masterful techniques and tames and harmonizes salt, acid, bitter, sweet, fat, and umami into elegance. Thai Royal cuisine eschews strong flavours and aromas and, for polite eating, the same with bones, pits and stones.

At the collaborative dinner, Phanthoupheng’s artistry greeted us at the entrance — three-dimensional displays of dahlia and chrysanthemum, intricately carved into watermelon and honeydew, requiring a Zen focus.

Her two-star mentor feels she’d be clutching a couple stars, too, if the Michelin Guide were in Richmond. (It isn’t.)

“She’s better than me now. I’m proud of her,” said Jangprai, in an interview before the dinner. Really? I ask. He humbly stood by the statement. “She’s doing very, very well. She was a student who was focused and very, very detailed and organized.”

Phanthoupheng beams: “He saw me working in the kitchen and he told me, ‘Wow, you’re better than me now. You should get two Michelin stars here’. I made him proud. I did it,” she says. “It’s my dream to get there.” (Vancouver doesn’t yet have a two-star restaurant.) As he worked beside her during the two dinners, he called out “Yes, sir!” playfully handing her boss status.

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Jangprai began cooking when he was 11 at his family’s restaurant, where the Royal Family sent staff to pick up food. During a 11-year period in Europe, he cooked in three-Michelin star restaurants (Pierre Gagnaire, El Celler de Can Roca), picking up modern European techniques.

“I cooked for Prime Minister Trudeau,” he says, referring to the 2022 APEC ministerial meeting in Bangkok. His restaurant R-Haan won one Michelin star in 2019, a year after the Guide arrived in Bangkok, then, in 2020, it was the first Thai restaurant to receive two stars.

Both he and Phanthoupheng feel cooking Thai food isn’t the same without the lived Thai experience. “It’s the soul,” they chime in unison. “The taste, colour, texture, visual, and aroma have to balance and make a symphony together,” Jangprai says. “You really have to know how to conduct different symphonies.”

At the collaborative dinner, they planned the seven-course tasting menu, along with four canapés and mignardise, by phone and each dish was a joint effort — not an easy process. More commonly, chefs contribute alternating courses.

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The dinner began with four two-bite snacks starring jackfruit, duck breast, rice vermicelli and grilled chicken. A salad, with delicate vegetables, prawns and beluga caviar arrived in a dramatic glass bowl, appearing out of a dry ice vapour cloud. Every element was placed with precision, most likely with the help of micro-tweezers.

A sensuous, delicious octopus soup with coconut and young galangal followed. For the sour aspect, the chefs used a special Thai lime. A black seaweed shaped tuile clung to the bowl.

Sourcing Thai ingredients can be challenging, requiring custom clearances. But for Phanthoupheng, it’s a must. For example, the jasmine rice is grown at her family farm in Thailand and she insists on a particular Thai fish sauce. She’s in the process of importing Thai mangoes, which she can’t find here.

“I want people to taste what they would taste in Thailand,” she says.

That fish sauce added umami notes in the third course — marinated grilled Japanese hamachi marinated in lemongrass, lime leaves, curry spice and fish sauce and served with satay sauce.

Nova Scotia lobster lay naked and pristine, intact from a very careful disrobing from its shell after gentle sous vide bath with aromatics and then a quick sear. It was re-robed in a heavenly sauce reduced and concentrated into creaminess from tom yum soup broth — a five-hour process.

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Dungeness crab with yellow curry and rice vermicelli was plated just so with the crab swaddled in vermicelli, surrounded by pops of colour from petals and micro-herbs. They sourced a particular vermicelli noodle from Thailand.

“Aroma is everything,” Phanthoupheng says. Lemongrass, lime zest and finger root aromatized that curry. Finger root rhizome, a mild, sweet, herbaceous and gingery, “makes it smell very nice,” she says.

Even the meat course was light and elegant. Japanese A5 Wagyu and B.C. water buffalo tenderloins with spicy jungle curry came with herbed jasmine rice and carved local veggies. The curry was spicy in the Royal sense — mildly so. The massaman curry, with herbs, star anise, cloves, cinnamon was satiny and earthy.

The six previous courses could have stolen the joy out of dessert, but they weren’t burdened with fat, strong flavours or for that matter, sometimes hard-to-digest wheat or dairy. So I gleefully welcomed the parade of desserts — not too sweet but just enough.

First, a quenelle of candle-smoked jackfruit ice cream and sticky rice with taro root, flecked with gold leaf and encased in banana leaf. In Thai cuisine, tian op, a culinary candle scented with aromatics, is used to smoke foods, especially desserts.

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Then a sour mango sorbet with fish sauce caramel. What? Who would allow the funk of fish sauce into a royal dessert? Well, the chefs tamed the funk and transformed its depth into a whole new umami after experimenting with different sugars.

“When I was young, I loved to eat sour mango with a sweet fish sauce,” says Phanthoupheng. “That’s where I got the idea.”

That sauce was incorporated into the sorbet as well.

Pink-hued water chestnut and coconut cream cleansed my palate before the final bites — a luk chup mandarin orange (a Thai craft of sculpting with mung bean paste) and a white lotus flower cookie infused with candle smoke.

The meal came with a premium wine pairing by the restaurant’s consulting master sommelier, Pier-Alexis Soulière (including a grand cru champagne) or a tea pairing by in-house tea sommelier Lena Pan. Wine consultant Soulière is a phenom (World Young Sommelier of the Year in 2014, Quebec’s Best Sommelier, Best Sommelier of the Americas, Best Sommelier of Canada) and he selects wines for the two tasting menu offerings at Baan Lao as well as the overall wine list. There is also an in-house restaurant sommelier and cocktails are curated by award-winning bartender Kaitlyn Stewart.

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The food was, indeed, meticulously crafted and up to Michelin standards.

At Baan Lao, servers appear to be following royal Thai and the more classic European protocols with literal white glove service and a hushed presence. Tableside conversation is minimized to quietly describe each course, with the idea that each guest is a king or queen. It’s not a great fit for Vancouver restaurant culture and more guest interaction and relaxation would really enhance the Baan Lao experience, I feel. But they stand by the formality, wanting to give guests the royal experience.

There are new plans afoot by the Baan Lao team but nothing’s finalized. You’ll have to keep tuned in.

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