John Chantarasak: “We are adamant that we have to open this restaurant now”

Back in 2021 AngloThai founders John Chantarasak and his wife Desiree announced that they would be opening their debut restaurant ​​AngloThai in central London, having formed a partnership with MJMK, the group behind Casa do Frango and KOL among other brands. Having run a number of successful residencies across London in venues including The Dairy and Newcomer wines, the time was right to open a permanent location of their restaurant that combines Thai cooking techniques and flavours with British ingredients.

Or at least it should have been. No restaurant materialised the following year, with the site having fallen through. Then the pair announced in November 2022 that they had secured another site​​, this time on Eastcastle Street in Fitzrovia. Now, after nearly two years of negotiations with the landlord that site had also fallen through, putting him back to square one.

Why is it taking so long to find the right site?

It’s difficult to get up and running on a site you’re going to call your permanent home. When you’re signing these leases for 10 to 15 years you need to be picky because it can really mess with your life if you’re not making choices for the right reasons. We were a bit naive to how hard it was to get over the line and thought that with MJMK involved it would be an easier journey than it’s been. They have found it frustrating as well. Maybe it’s because we’re incredibly picky about what we’re trying to do.

How long have you been searching?

We’ve been looking for a site since December 2020. We’ve gone the distance and had plans from architects and designers involved on four or maybe five sites, which would have involved six months’ worth of work to make it happen. There’s a lot to bring together. Desiree and I are involved in every single aspect of AngloThai from the light fittings, the taps and the wine list to the food, the art hanging up and the music. It was important to us to not lose control of those elements and curate a space that felt like a home from home for us. AngloThai embodies the two of us.

"You need knock backs to force you to ask yourself
very hard questions about whether you are doing
it for the right reason"

You had your eyes on Fitzrovia…

We want to create a destination style restaurant in central London that had a very community driven neighbourhood feel to it and that’s what we liked about Eastcastle Street. Despite it being a stone’s throw from Oxford Circus I’d not walked down it often myself, and that’s interesting about a central London location. We had almost agreed a site on the street prior to the more recent one so we have spent two years’ of work on that street now. I might not try third time lucky...

What happened to the site?

Things were agreed that when we finally came to sign didn’t pan out. A lot of the expectation of the building work such as extraction, air con, and power was starting to get pushed onto us rather than being the landlord’s responsibility [as initially agreed]. It was getting to a scary point where the funds needed to make these upgrades were spiralling out of control. I’m not surprised, and I don’t blame the landlord. It’s very easy for us as restaurateurs and chefs to pin it all on them but the past 12 months have been a roller coaster to navigate and I understand they had to make hard decisions as well.

How do you recover from so many false starts?

This one has definitely been the hardest to get ourselves back up from. Previous to this it just felt like a bit of bad luck. When you spend the best part of a year working on a project you expect to see something as a result, so it was very tough. It was the lowest we had been, and we had to take a fortnight completely away from it all, turn the phone and email off and decide what was best for us. You do need those knock backs to challenge you and force you to ask yourself those very hard questions about whether you are doing it for the right reasons. We are adamant that we have to open this restaurant now.

You and Desiree are now involved in Outcrop. Tell us about that.

I had been speaking with Danny and Johnny [Luca founders ] about struggling to open a restaurant and they said to get in touch about a new project they were working on. I’m going to be cooking over fire similar to the Som Saa days at Climpson's Arch and will be pushing to do a vegetable hero menu. It won’t necessarily be vegetarian dishes, but I’ll be cooking vegetables and supporting them with protein. The menu will be a la carte and we’ll keep it fun and accessible with big flavours that are Thai inspired but using as much British produce as possible. It will be a good learning curve for me doing something a bit new. I’ll be speaking to the other restaurants in the building [180 The Strand] that are using top-end produce and asking if I can take food off their hands that might have otherwise gone in the bin. There is turbot on the menu at Ikoyi and they say they don’t always get through fish frames and heads and that the kind of thing, and we can use them. I can them smoke over coconut husks to enhance a dish.

Does that mean you’ve stopped looking for a site for AngloThai?

Outcrop ​​will be open Wednesday to Saturday because we wanted time free to continue to look at restaurant opportunities. We have also got our agent scanning the landscape for us. Right now there is no point in taking our foot of the gas – we have gone a long way in working out what the interiors will look like and have spent a lot of time on the interiors and the wine list. We feel that if we find the right spot, we can allow the legal stuff to happen in the background, and once Outcrop finishes jump into the new site and focus on getting open hopefully sometime early next year.

How have things changed since you first started thinking of opening a restaurant?

When we started looking in 2020, we didn’t have a family; we now have an 18-month old son, so our priorities have had to shift. But that’s just part of life. In the beginning we were definitely thinking it would be a tasting menu restaurant, but we are now also very open to the idea that that might not be the future of mid-range restaurants anymore. It feels the appetite for that is tapering off a little bit. With a restaurant you can start with one thing and look to change and manipulate things and be flexible. One thing Desiree and I say is that we will never get it right from day one. We had also hoped to take a bit more a back seat approach, but the reality is I’m pretty much going to be in the kitchen every day and Desiree will be on the floor every day. But we are very happy to do that. We want people to come in and know we are there and that’s a big part of what AngloThai is for us.

What can we expect from AngloThai when it finally becomes a reality?

We want to open something relatively small. It will be about 40 or 50 covers. We want to be as humble as possible with what our expectations of what this restaurant is going to be and how we can keep it as affordable as possible and be accessible to a wide group of people. I feel more comfortable going in at a lower budget and doing things as well as we can within that budget and then putting any profit back into the business. I'd rather that than ending up with a huge CapEx and be worrying about paying it off for the next five years. Until then, I’m excited to be out there cooking again.