Michelin-starred chef Pichaya Soontornyanakij won’t be dialling down the spice for Australian palates when she opens Thai restaurants in Sydney and Perth next year.

Soontornyanakij, widely known as Chef Pam, is a celebrated Thai chef and restaurateur, best known for her Michelin-starred Thai-Chinese fine diner Potong in Bangkok, currently ranked 13th in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. She was also named world’s best female chef by the 50 Best judging panel in 2025.

Soontornyanakij’s first venture outside Thailand will be an outpost of her casual, contemporary Thai restaurant Khao San Sek at Crown Perth, which will open early in 2027, followed shortly by Sek, a new dining concept at Crown Sydney.

The news comes just weeks after Crown said triple Michelin-starred Swedish chef Björn Frantzén would launch restaurants in Sydney and Perth in mid-2027.

Opening in Australia was the natural choice for Soontornyanakij, who is one-quarter Australian on her grandmother’s side and grew up eating a mix of Thai, Chinese and Australian food at home, Vegemite included, which she still loves.

Soontornyanakij also believes Australia is the right fit because local diners already understand Thai cuisine well. “The Thai food in Australia is very authentic, so I don’t have to cut down the chillies, or just bring stuff like tom yum or pad Thai,” she says. “I want to bring regional Thai food, and I feel the people there are ready for it.”

Both of Soontornyanakij’s restaurants will build their menu around what she calls the five sacred ingredients: rice, chilli, coconut, palm sugar and fish sauce, the foundations of Thai cuisine. Sek will explore these through a tasting menu, while Khao San Sek will take a more casual approach, with dishes designed to be shared family-style.

Sek, which translates to “enchanted”, will open in the former 88 Noodle site on level three of Crown Sydney, with an open kitchen and seating for 40. The tasting menu will move from a run of small snacks into samrub, a traditional Thai-style of dining in which an ensemble of dishes is served at once so you can experience their flavours and textures together.

Among the snacks will be nam prik, a hot sour chilli paste made from a blend of chillies, garlic and shrimp paste served with crudites. Som tum, or green papaya salad, will be pounded at the table in a mortar and pestle, the way you might see at a street cart in Bangkok. “This is so you can eat the salad while it’s still crunchy and zingy,” Soontornyanakij says.

A dessert trolley will do the rounds, offering petit four-style sweets including khanom tako, a two-layer Thai coconut pudding served in folded pandan leaf cups.

In Perth, Khao San Sek, which means “enchanted rice”, will open in the former Bistro Guillaume space on the ground level, with seating for more than 100. The menu will showcase some of Thailand’s native rice varieties “of all different aromas and textures”, says Soontornyanakij, alongside sato, a fermented Thai rice wine.

The menu will also draw on dishes from Soontornyanakij’s Bangkok restaurant of the same name on Song Wat Road, including her fish sauce granita, a tangy shaved ice dessert served with sour fruits such as bilimbi and pomelo and finished with fried shallots. Other dishes will be reworked around local produce such as Fremantle octopus, blue swimmer crab and rock lobster. Whether Vegemite makes an appearance remains to be seen.