The Culinary Home
of Chef Tam

(Chef Portrait) In 2019, when Chudaree “Tam” Debhakam stepped into her grandmother’s vacant house for the first time in more than a decade—the 50-year-old house that would eventually become her two-Michelin-starred restaurant, Baan Tepa—a shiver ran up her spine. Ever since her uncle moved out years earlier, the mid-century Thai house seemed to be holding its breath: sunlight barely seeped through the windows, dust clung to old paintings, and the dark teak floor seemed to have lost its warm red-gold tones. Tucked just beyond the roar of Ramkhamhaeng Road, near the Rajamangala National Stadium and its swirl of concert crowds and university students, the house stood far from Bangkok’s established fine-dining enclaves—an unlikely address for a coveted dinner reservation.

But Debhakam has always been drawn to a challenge. The now 33-year-old chef—named Asia’s Best Female Chef in 2025 and the first Thai female chef to be awarded two Michelin stars—grew up in Bangkok dribbling balls on basketball courts, sprinting across football fields, and swimming laps. Long before there was a family house to restore or a restaurant to helm, she immersed herself in competitive sports, becoming fluent in a language based around discipline and drive. Debhakam didn’t grow up wanting to become a chef, but the camaraderie and competitiveness of a sports team naturally mirrored that of a kitchen brigade—you carried your weight, or you didn’t, and the way people spoke to you changed the moment they knew you could.

An Appetite for Pressure
Starting her culinary journey at Bangkok’s acclaimed The Water Library, for Debhakam there was a thrill in ascending the tiers from peeling crates of apples, to butchering fish, then working the line. “It was all about the pressure, the perfectionism, and the time constraints. Pushing something as close to perfect as you can in a limited amount of time while under stress? I loved that,” says Debhakam. That appetite for high pressure followed her to Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a Michelin-starred farm and restaurant an hour north of New York City, where a six-month course stretched into a multi-year culinary education in farming, soil health, and how the plate ties back to the land.

For Debhakam, her Bangkok homecoming morphed into its own kind of education. “At that time, I was a little lost,” she admits. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. There wasn’t anywhere in Bangkok where I felt like I wanted to go and work.” If Blue Hill had taught her to look closely at the ground beneath her feet, coming home cracked open everything Debhakam thought she already understood about her own cuisine. Rather than waiting for the right kitchen to appear, she decided to traverse the lesser-traveled corners of the country, uncovering food cultures she hadn’t encountered growing up. In Chiang Rai—where Thailand touches Myanmar and Laos—she sat with Akha hill tribe communities and tasted makwen, a prickly ash with a sharp, citrusy heat that still appears on the Baan Tepa menu today.

“There is so much in Thai cuisine, so much in the realm of Thai ingredients, that has not been explored or talked about yet,” she says. “If you drive 40 minutes between northern villages, the same dish with the same name is completely different. The noodles will be done differently, or the soup. That was really cool for me to discover.”

A Family Connection
Out of her year of travels emerged a pop-up Debhakam operated from her family home in Bangkok, where the herbs, flavors, and textures of Thailand’s provinces began appearing across the table. Debhakam grew her team from two people to five, and the guests swelled from dinner party size to large events with 200 people. Her two sisters, she says amused, were not particularly pleased to come downstairs for breakfast every morning to find kitchen staff weaving in and out of the house. When the family kitchen’s daily commandeering became untenable to those who lived there, her father floated the idea of another location: Debhakam’s grandmother’s house, standing silent and empty just off Ramkhamhaeng Road, with its muddy soil and decade of dust.

It wasn’t an obvious choice at first. Debhakam remembers asking her dad, “What are the chances people are going to come all the way out here to visit my restaurant?” But as the team began converting the old parking garage into a central kitchen for the pop-up, they noticed there was enough space to fit in a kitchen table.

In February 2019, the first iteration of Baan Tepa opened—Baan meaning home in Thai, Tepa drawn from the family name—as a 12-seat communal kitchen table, a concept still largely novel in Bangkok’s dining scene. The house itself remained untouched. Although her grandmother, Lady Suwaree Debhakam, passed away when Debhakam was still young, her memory returns to her in flashes: an industrious woman who was always in motion, and who, even as she grew ill, never left the house without her lipstick on. “I remember her always being so beautiful, proper, and done up,” Debhakam recalls fondly. “I love that about the woman she was. But it’s her work ethic, her dedication, and her passion that inspired me to be the person I am.”

The restoration that followed became as personal as it was architectural, with every decision made with the woman who once laughed, cooked, and moved through the house in mind. “I don’t think I’ll ever see this as my restaurant or my house,” Debhakam acknowledges. “It will always be my grandmother’s house. I feel like I’m just keeping it for her.” The house had lived far longer in her father and his sibling’s bones than it ever had in hers; like any family heirloom, there were memories to protect and other people’s grief to be mindful of. When an architect proposed opening the ceiling all the way to the second floor—which would have meant cutting through her grandmother’s bedroom—the bold idea was initially met with resistance from the family. “I had to get approval for every single wall or ceiling that was going to be ripped out,” recalls Debhakam. “Everything I lived and breathed was that house.”

A Menu of Memories
If the house held the family’s memory, the restaurant allowed Debhakam to begin shaping her own chapter inside it. The evolving seven-course tasting menu has since become the most personal reflection of Debhakam’s journey as a chef. Her signature chicken liver mousse—lacquered in tamarind jaew, sprinkled with toasted rice, and served with a young rice sourdough loaf—traces back to the grilled skewer carts that lined the street outside her school, the smell of charred liver and sticky rice marking the end of every school day. The Dong Dang noodles, paired with crispy sun-dried squid and salted duck egg, were born from a stack of 7-Eleven coffee cups with holes poked in the bottom which were repurposed as a scrappy noodle presser. A broken-rice porridge with river prawn transforms what most kitchens would discard into the very heart of the dish. Each course becomes a lens into where Debhakam grew up and what she refuses to forget.

Seven years in and two Michelin stars later, the first awarded in the 2023 guide and the second in 2024, Debhakam is learning to exhale. Ask her what she does when no one needs anything from her and she pauses. Truthfully, she ponders out loud, she’s not sure. With Baan Tepa currently closed for renovations, she experienced something close to an off-day recently in Milan: no agenda, no kitchen, just cobblestones underfoot and enough unstructured time to wander between five restaurants and two museums.

“I still struggle to enjoy hospitality the way it should be enjoyed,” she says with a laugh. “I’m always analyzing the food, but I would love to just pretend to not be in the industry and enjoy it the way it should be.” The armor she once wore as a 26-year-old woman running her own kitchen and hiring male chefs older than her in a culture with deep codes around seniority, however, has fallen away. “That tough exterior I felt I had to put on?” she says, “I feel like I don’t need that anymore.”

In August 2026, the house on Ramkhamhaeng Road opened its doors again—its teak floors polished back to their warm red-gold, its high ceilings held intact, a new interior fine-tuned within the same old walls. Just as it has always been: her grandmother’s house, and Debhakam’s to keep.