Thai recipes and kitchen stories from chef, restaurateur and cookbook author Sebby Holmes

I’m Sebby. I cook Thai food and I write about it, and somewhere along the way that turned into two businesses and a couple of books with my name on the spine that I still half suspect are a printing error.

This is where I keep the recipes and the writing. Not the polished stuff a magazine commissions, just what my team and I are actually cooking, plus the odd story from twenty-odd years in kitchens. A lot of it gets written with a camera round my neck and a laptop balanced on the stovetop, so forgive the occasional curry stain. I’m in my early thirties and I’ve been doing this since I was thirteen, which either makes me experienced or makes me question some early decisions, depending on the day.

I trained in British kitchens first. Then I did a journalism degree, worked out fairly quickly it wasn’t going to make me rich, and went back to the stove, this time falling hard for Thai food. I cooked under Jane Alty at The Begging Bowl and worked up to sous chef, then ran the pass as head chef when The Smoking Goat opened in Soho. At 26 I went out on my own, which sounds braver than it actually was.

Farang started as a street food operation, slinging whole roasted red curry chickens at Hawker House and Dinerama. The restaurant itself happened almost by accident. My step-dad Marco was retiring from his place, The San Daniele in Highbury, and put me in touch with his landlord. I took a short lease and carried on cooking those same chickens out of a knackered old pizza oven in his former dining room. It grew faster than any of us expected, and within a year we’d picked up a Michelin Bib Gourmand and a spot in the country’s top hundred restaurants. I never set out to be a career chef or run a restaurant, so a fair bit of this still feels like it happened to someone else.

Payst came later, and that one’s a proper family story. My brother Tony builds engines for planes, an actual aerospace engineer. When the pandemic made him redundant we finally had time to do the thing we’d been talking about for years, and we built the UK’s first wholesale fresh Thai curry paste brand out of the Farang kitchen. We make every paste by hand each week and chill it rather than pasteurise it, so it tastes like it just came off the pestle and mortar. When Tony’s old employer offered him his job back, he told them where to put it. He runs the company now.

Somewhere in there I wrote two cookbooks, Cook Thai and Thai in 7, and got to do some genuinely daft things. I’ve cooked Thai feasting menus in five-star hotels in Budapest. I once ran a seven-course insect tasting menu in North London that I’m still surprised people paid for. And there was the night I cooked for the Thai Ambassador, which was every bit as nerve-shredding as it sounds.

So that’s the lucky part, and I do know it’s luck as much as graft. What I want this site to be is the useful part. Recipes that work in a home kitchen, written by someone who cooks them for a living, plus the bits of restaurant life nobody warns you about. Something new lands most weeks. If that’s your sort of thing, leave me your email and I’ll send it over.

The best photos here come from friends with proper cameras. The dodgy ones are mine, and I’ll keep those to a minimum.

Drop me a line any time. I read everything and reply when I can, unless it’s rude, in which case you can bugger off.

Cheers,

Sebby