A Thai-American millennial went to Bangkok to find 'real Thai food.' Now, his private supper club has a monthslong waitlist.

01.06.2024 - 16:21 / insider.com

As a half-Thai, half-American kid growing up in Florida, Dylan Eitharong often felt out of place.

His father, a Thai immigrant, was focused on building a new life in the US and rarely taught him about Thai culture. But it was a comment his dad made while the family was eating out at a Chinese restaurant that sparked his curiosity about Thai cuisine.

"My dad told me this was 'real' Chinese food. It was different from the American Chinese takeout food. That made me think: If this is 'real' Chinese food, then is there 'real' Thai food too?" Eitharong told Business Insider.

His dad told him he'd have to figure out this for himself. "After that, I just fell into that wormhole, wanting to know what it was really like and what it tasted like," Eitharong said.

Eitharong, now 32, said the Thai restaurants he had grown up with in the US served things like green curry with bell peppers, and nothing was ever too spicy. He voraciously researched online and began cooking at home as a hobby.

By the time he was enrolled in community college in Orlando, studying to be a teacher, he was also running a boat noodle pop-up at Swine & Sons, a Michelin-recognized restaurant in Florida. "After that, I felt like this cooking thing was kinda fun so I just dropped out of school," Eitharong said.

He went on to open his own pop-up, Bangrak Thai Street Kitchen, and expand his menu to serve street favorites such as khao soi (noodles with curry soup) and fried rice with fermented pork sausages.

Eitharong kept trying out new recipes but eventually concluded there was only so much he could learn in the US: "I had never been to Thailand before I was 23." After his first trip to Thailand, he continued to fly back and forth between Thailand and Florida every few months.

Eitharong took up Thai cooking masterclasses with a renowned food scholar, Hanuman Aspler, in Chiang Mai — a province in northern Thailand. Back in Bangkok, he worked as a chef at a contemporary Thai restaurant, before he moved on to set up his own pop-ups.

In 2019, he moved to Thailand. His goal was to continue learning more about Thai food. "In that first year, I wasn't getting the experience I wanted living in Thailand though, because Covid was happening," Eitharong said.

Forced to quarantine at his aunt's old townhouse deep in the residential Bangkokneighborhood of Onnut, he spent his free time teaching himself the language so he could read old Thai recipe books. During this time, he learned how to cook less common dishes and forge his own style of loud, maximalist flavors.

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"It was curry that made it immediately click for me, that Thai food in Thailand doesn't taste like what you eat in America," he said. "In the US, curry was disgusting, and I hated