It’s a sunny afternoon when I wander into Lotus at The Park to meet Tananya Hanain, the new chef de cuisine. A Thai national, Hanain moved to Chennai in April with the aim of revamping the menu at the Thai speciality restaurant. And the chef has a clear vision of what she wants to offer the city — authentic Thai food; nothing Indianised.
“I’ve seen the kind of Thai food people make here. It’s the same ingredients, but the technique is very different. Probably to suit local tastes. For instance, people here seem to like their stir fries very saucy. In traditional Thai cooking, we use only oyster or mushroom sauce in our stir fries, but here people like to use cornflour to thicken the gravy. So what I hope to present here is some very authentic fare,” she smiles. So there will be yum pla fu (steamed fish that is smashed and then deep fried and served with a mango or green apple salad), crispy lamb salad in lotus petal (the lotus petal can be eaten, she says), pla tod samunprai (red snapper fried whole with Thai herbs), and a range of Thai desserts such as tako (mak beans froth topped with corn and coconut) and bua loy (rice flour coloured with carrots and beets and served in a pandan leaf with tender coconut).
She adds that Thai food is all about a balance of flavours. “There’s sweet, salty, sour, spicy. It is just about knowing what goes where.”
Hanain says that she draws a lot of inspiration from her mother. “I’d watch her cook these elaborate meals for us when we were kids. It was fascinating how she achieved such a great balance of flavours. I come from Chiang Mai, which is a mountainous region, and the food there differs from what you’d find in the South of Thailand. The diversity is fascinating,” says the chef, who was initially training to be a nurse and then a chartered accountant.
“I was studying in Australia. But halfway through, I realised that I really wanted to be a chef,” she says. That led to her working at a hotel to train as a chef in Western food. But her Thai roots had her moving back to Thailand to study Thai cooking at the Dusit Thani Culinary School. “That was a revelation of sorts. Cooking as a professional chef is so different from what I’d seen my mother doing. Home cooking is very intuitive, while as a professional, there’s a step-wise recipe to be followed.”
This also led to Hanain’s pursuit of using fresh ingredients and making dishes from scratch. No ready-made coconut milk or curry pastes for her. “For my green curry for instance, I make everything from scratch. That is why it has such an intense flavour,” she says, adding that it is the chilli leaf that lends the green curry its trademark colour. And you don’t need any oil while cooking it either, she lets in. “The oil comes from the coconut milk.”
Hanain herself loves green curry. “But I don’t really like it with rice. I like my curry with some vermicelli. That’s the way I’ve grown up eating it. It’s not something people outside of Thailand are very familiar with. In fact, in the South of Thailand, people like to eat their curry with paratha.”
The chef, who has worked in Perth, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore, says that she loves to present traditional Thai food in a contemporary way. But for now, she’s enjoying her time in India, and its food too. “I’ve tried stuff like chicken biryani, tikka masala and payasam and I love them. What I really love though is butter chicken. Then again, I think certain Indian foods resemble Thai food. Especially food from Kerala. The only difference is there are more spices involved here.”
In this series we feature people who continue to work as they travel.