Laap sounds like the Lao word for luck, used to be food for weddings and funerals, and in the north comes raw with blood and bile. Here's the whole family, and why aged British beef belongs in it.

I spent the Great Taste Golden Fork ceremony behind a table, spooning little pots of hung lay into the hands of anybody who came past. That was the job as far as I was concerned. Then they read our name out, and Nigel Barden came down through the room with the microphone and handed us the award with a serving spoon still in my hand.

Twenty-two pence in every pound, gone before the dish leaves the kitchen. Here's what your Thursday night takeaway really costs, and who it costs.

A chef's honest interrogation of the world's most complained-about herb, the science behind the soap gene, and why most coriander haters are looking for drama.

I came to Thai food the wrong way. No family connection, no grandmother's kitchen smelling of galangal. Fifteen years later the water keeps getting deeper, and that is precisely why I haven't stopped.

I remember the first time I put a jungle curry on the menu at Farang. A few customers looked at it like I'd made a mistake. Now those same customers come in and ask for more chilli with it.

I pay £30,000 in VAT every single quarter. Two licensed venues are closing permanently every single day in the UK. Here's why the government needs to cut hospitality VAT to 10%, and why it really is that simple.

I've been cooking Thai food in London for fifteen years. For most of that time I was having the same conversation. Thai food is more than pad thai and green curry. Give it time. The time is now.

Pad Thai is not Thai food. Or rather, it is, but it's about as representative of Thai cooking as a fish finger is of British cuisine. After nine years running Farang, I'm done being polite about it.

The first kitchen I worked in, everything you couldn't use went straight in the bin. Thai cuisine changed that for me. Here's what Farang actually does with the parts most kitchens throw away.

The call came on a Tuesday. The Royal Thai Embassy wanted to know if I'd be interested in cooking a demonstration for Thailand's Prime Minister during her official UK visit. I said yes before I'd finished reading the sentence.

The fishmonger texts me at dawn. Not every morning, but often enough that I check my phone before I've had a coffee. Sometimes it's a load of British mackerel just landed. That's what working with suppliers who care actually looks like.

The first thing you learn about curry paste is that it takes longer than you think. The second thing is that your arm will hurt. The third is that it's worth it by a distance that makes every other shortcut in cooking feel trivial.

Britain's relationship with chilli used to be simple. There was curry, which came in mild, medium or hot, and there was vindaloo, which existed as a dare. Then came the heat challenge era. That's not what chilli is for.

We got a one-star review last year from someone who never made it past the front door. They tried to walk in on a Friday night without a booking, the restaurant was full, they left. Half an hour later: one star. "Wouldn't seat us. Very rude." We'd never met.

Green curry is the most misunderstood dish in Thai cooking, at least in this country. Most people in Britain have eaten it, or think they have. What they've eaten is a sweet, mild, pale green soup from a takeaway box. It is categorically not the same thing.

It's late January 2020, and the team and I are heading to Bangkok for a week. By March we had twenty-five staff in a very expensive empty building and no income plan. We went from hero to zero in a matter of hours. This is how Farang weathered it.

There is no scripted way to open a restaurant. In my short few years opening Farang, I have made many mistakes. Some respectable, some just outright bonkers. With the right frame of mind, they've all taught me something.