The Chef Behind One of the World’s Best Restaurants Is Opening a Thai Dining Room in Perth

Chef Pam’s exceptional kitchen skills and Thai Chinese roots are on full display at Potong, her Bangkok restaurant that received its Michelin star within its opening year. In 2025, the fine diner debuted at number 13 on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. Next year, she’ll open two Australian venues.

Khao San Sek will open at Crown Perth, and Sek will open at Crown Sydney. Both hero what Chef Pam calls Thailand’s “five sacred ingredients” – rice, coconut, chilli, palm sugar and fish sauce.

“We feel the food scene in Australia is very exciting,” Chef Pam says. “Especially Asian cuisine – it’s very authentic, so we’re ready to bring our Thai flavours there.”

Along with her business partner and husband Tor Boonpiti, Chef Pam is bringing her teams from Thailand for the 2027 launch period. They will split their time between Perth and Sydney.

Perth’s Khao San Sek will be an outpost of Khao San Sek, Bangkok’s Son Wat Road restaurant, which focuses on Chef Pam’s “fun” à la carte offering. It’s here that the five sacred ingredients guide the way, incorporating Australia’s produce bowl too.

“We want to present Thailand by pivoting through these ingredients, which we think are sacred to Thai cuisine,” she says. “If we talk about those ingredients, they scream Thai flavours – and make Thai cuisine Thai.” 

In Bangkok, river prawns are served sauced up with garlic, pepper and palm sugar. “It’s beautiful, but in Perth we found that they have this lobster called marron,” says Chef Pam. “So we want to introduce that to our Thai dishes, and make it a signature of the terroir. 

Bangkok’s crudo of Thai sea bass will instead use Tasmanian trout, and blue swimmer crab and Fremantle octopus will feature elsewhere. “The sauce can be the same, the main produce can be different – but it’s still Thai.”

Sydney’s Sek, on the other hand, is a 35-seater degustation-only restaurant. It’s the first fine diner Chef Pam has opened outside of Thailand. “We want to represent Thai food in a different way,” Chef Pam says. “More refined. We want to focus more on the chef, the seasonality and how the courses progress – show how Thai people really eat.”

Sek’s menu includes nam prik, a chilli paste served with crudités and a dessert trolley to finish. “In Thailand, when we go to traditional Thai dessert, it’s always like small bites – almost like petit fours, but a little bit bigger with flavours of coconut, pandan, sakhu [tapioca]. So for the guests to have all [those dessert flavours] in one meal, it feels like they’ve come to Thailand,” she says.

The news comes soon after the announcement that Swedish chef Björn Frantzén – who currently holds nine Michelin stars across his three restaurants ­– is joining the Crown’s hospitality stable in Sydney and Perth.

Khao San Sek is expected to open at Crown Perth in mid-2027. Sek will also open at Crown Sydney in mid-2027.