Coming Soon, Sydney: One of the World’s Best Chefs To Open Her First Fine Diner Outside of Thailand

Chef Pam’s exceptional kitchen skills and Thai Chinese roots are on full display at Potong, her Bangkok restaurant that received a Michelin star within its opening year. In 2025, the fine diner debuted at number 13 on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. And come new year, she’ll be in Australia to open venues in both Sydney and Perth.

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

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

In Sydney, this manifests as Sek. The degustation-only restaurant is the first fine diner Chef Pam has opened outside of Thailand, and is a concept and format she’s developed especially for the city and space. Expect room for about 35 diners, with a set menu sharing the chef’s interpretation of Thai traditions. “We want to represent Thai food in a different way,” she says. “More refined. We want to focus more on the chef, the seasonality and how the courses progress – show how Thai people really eat.

“One of the first courses is nam prik, which is chilli paste. We eat that with fresh vegetables, like crudité. Then at the end it’s almost like a samrap, or sharing meal, which is tradition for Thai people – and of course we serve with rice.”

Expect a view over the kitchen and considered tableside elements throughout the menu, including 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,” the chef shares. “Always 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.” 

On the other side of the country, the format will be more casual. An outpost of Khao San Sek, Bangkok’s Song Wat Road restaurant, will open in Perth, bringing 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.”

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. 

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

Sek is expected to open at Crown Sydney in mid-2027.