Meet our chef
Chef Pim Techmuanvivit
nahm has been helmed by Chef Pim Techmuanvivit since 2019. A Bangkok native with a global culinary career, Chef Pim owns multiple restaurants and has been named as one of the world’s most influential food bloggers by The Guardian.
Despite her international experience and acclaim, Chef Pim’s food remains strongly connected to her roots – she attributes her culinary gifts to the culture of Thai women passing on skills and recipes to each generation.
CULINARY BACKGROUND
Chef Pim opened her first restaurant, Kin Khao in San Francisco in 2014. It won international acclaim and its first Michelin star in 2015, only one year after its opening. Her second restaurant, Nari, earned its own Michelin star in 2024.
Chef Pim was born and raised in Bangkok, and still considers herself a Bangkok girl at heart. Her childhood home was very near the Central Business District, where nahm is located. The whole city is intimately familiar to her — its rhythm, energy and flavours. Her work takes her all over the world, but when she gets back to Bangkok after a period of travel, it’s an assault to the senses. It’s a city that feeds your dreams with its technicolour of noise, sound and light, flaring at every hour of the day.
She splits her time between Bangkok, New Zealand and the United States — an arrangement that began when she was a student. She didn’t go to culinary school; she was headed for Silicon Valley. With that in mind, she went to college in the United States, studying Materials Science and Engineering. She started cooking when she was homesick, and searching for familiar flavours from her childhood — things made the traditional way, like when she was growing up. But she couldn’t find any Thai food that she wanted to eat.
Chasing authenticity has become my guiding principle in how Chef Pim cooks. That and finding enjoyment in the process — just as she did all those years ago as a student making her first batches of chilli jam. The key lies in local, fresh ingredients. When she's back in her kitchen in Bangkok, you're not going to see strawberries or truffles; she tries to avoid using ingredients that are shipped halfway across the world. nahm grows some of their own herbs and spices on the roof — ming aralia, pandan, jasmine, and other edible flowers that she can trace from seed to bloom. She’d love it if they had their own farm, but the restaurant is in the middle of Bangkok's Central Business District; that’s not realistic. Instead, she's cultivated relationships with artisans and small farmers throughout Thailand. Supporting small-scale farmers and producers is essential. She seeks out artisanal products and ingredients wherever possible — a shrimp paste producer halfway down the southern peninsula of Thailand, for instance, or a tiny fishing cooperative. Chefs aren’t the be-all and end-all of the culinary system. If she doesn’t have the best coconut, or palm sugar, or shrimp paste, there’s only so much she can do to make her food taste good.
I want diners to feel as though they’ve been invited to the home of their Thai friends, to experience authentic cuisine that’s rich in flavour and cooked from the heart.
Learn more about Chef Pim’s journey to nahm, from her culinary origins to running kitchens and opening restaurants in some of the world’s most exciting cities here.