Asia’s Best Female Chef 2025 is making waves in Thailand’s capital city with her indigenous produce obsession.
Imported lobster or wild-caught river prawns from Thailand’s southern provinces? For Chudaree Debhakam, also known as Chef Tam, the answer couldn’t be clearer. “Traditional views of what luxury ingredients are have been ingrained in our dining scene for years,” she says. “Thai ingredients deserve to be seen in the same light, and elevated with creativity and craftsmanship.”
It’s just one of the ways that Baan Tepa, her restaurant in Bangkok, politely but firmly subverts expectations of what fine dining should be. Here, the table centrepiece might be sculpted from repurposed clam shells, while the menu is a love letter to regional Thai produce (not least those show-stopping prawns).
Her dishes transform the familiar into something new and exquisite, whether it’s Kill the Kapi, inspired by fermented shrimp paste, or her iconic squid-ink noodles. Little wonder Baan Tepa has scored a slew of awards since opening in 2020, as well as making the pivotal leap from one Michelin star to two.
The making of a chef
If Chef Tam seems to thrive on pressure, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. She planned to be a professional athlete, until reality kicked in. “I just didn’t have what it took to compete at that level.” The experience left her feeling lost, until she stepped into the kitchen, which – to her surprise – felt like coming home.
“There was an uncanny resemblance between working in a kitchen and being on a sports team, from the long hours of training and practice, honing real skills, to having to support those around you, and trying to deliver your own best performance.”
The organic garden at the centre of the Baan Tepa compound is just as important as the restaurant
Several years in the US proved formative for her as a chef, especially a stint at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, where Dan Barber’s radical reset of fine dining is grounded in the Hudson Valley Soil. “It’s a place that makes you question the existing food systems and consider the roots of the ingredients we see every day,” she says.
“Cooking food becomes much more than the work of chefs. It starts from the source: the land in which ingredients are cultivated, and the work of the people behind them. It made me wonder if I could do more in my career as a chef, creating something that could have a lasting impact on the community around me.”
It starts with the soil
At Baan Tepa, the dining room and hyper-focused kitchen are just part of the picture. Just as important is the organic garden at the centre of the compound, with its spiral of aromatic herbs and abundant raised beds, tended by the chefs and edged with leafy som saa (bitter orange) trees. Even the plants’ names have a poetry of their own: cow slip creeper, moon fruit, lemongrass and lotus, chamomile and karonda.
“With limited space, we grow ingredients that are strong in flavour and aroma, as a little goes a long way,” Chef Tam explains. “A lot of our focus is on indigenous herbs which we can grow almost all year round.” The compost, meanwhile, comes from food scraps from the kitchen – if they haven’t been used to enrich stocks, or fermented to make kombucha.
Baan Tepa politely but firmly subverts expectations of what fine dining should be
Sustainability is woven into every aspect of this place, with meticulous and often ingenious recycling and reusing (the sculpted candlesticks made from egg and seafood shells are an excellent example). “At Stone Barns, I saw what it means to have sustainability be part of a community’s DNA,” she says. “Now I realise what it takes to implement that: it’s a whole other beast! It takes time, finances and dedication, but I genuinely believe it’s possible.” It is, she thinks, the way forward for the wider restaurant industry.
In praise of the provincial
Beyond their own garden, regional produce is sourced from the length and breadth of Thailand, from high-altitude mountain herbs to aromatic Samerng black rice. “We love to use different, sometimes non-traditional techniques, to work with ingredients and see what we can do with them,” says Chef Tam. That might mean turning gai (freshwater seaweed) into an ethereal floss, making ice cream from wild mushrooms, or serving up a snack of tangled, crispy chu onion roots.
It’s part of a larger trend on the Thai food scene, she says, and a new respect for indigenous ingredients. “Now, we have high-end restaurants serving catfish, offal, Thai mackerel and fermented fish and shrimp; things you wouldn’t traditionally expect in these kinds of establishments. It’s all hugely exciting.”
At Baan Tepa, it’s meant rethinking the current norms of food production. “Instead, we strive for the highest quality produce, which starts at the beginning of the supply chain with the people who foraged, farmed and cultivated these ingredients. They are the heart of what we do, and we wouldn’t be here without them.”
Dong Dang noodles are made in a similar way to rice noodles but with a wider shape and chewier texture
Learning from communities and small-scale producers is what’s shaped her signature dishes, from the hand-pressed Dong Dang noodles, made with Trang-province rice flour, to Anatomy of a River Prawn made with Phatthalung prawns. “How you approach an ingredient like that is so important,” she says. “You have to understand the ecosystem it comes from, what it feeds on and how to handle it. Communication with the fishermen is key, as is sharing those stories with our guests.”
Creating the next chapter
What comes next, she hopes, will be a continuation of that learning. “I’d like to focus on Thai culinary culture and heritage produce, and create a culinary space where we can research, develop and share ideas of how ingredients can be used, as well as working with our producers to elevate the quality even further.”
For now, though, there’s plenty to keep the team busy at Baan Tepa. “Some days I can handle the pressuure better than others,” Chef Tam says. “It’s a learning process, and I’m still in the middle of it. There will always be instances that can make you doubt yourself, so I try to look at the bigger picture of why we embarked on this journey, and where we are now. It’s a pretty humbling feeling.”
Chef Tam is the winner of Asia’s Best Female Chef Award 2025, sponsored by Nongshim Shinramyun. The full list of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2025 will be revealed on 25 March from Seoul.
