Long Chim comes to Melbourne
Australian chef and Thai food specialist David Thompson is best known for his design-focused Long Chim restaurants – Singapore, Perth and Sydney are already up and running and this week, Melbourne has picked one up at Crown.
That’s for now.
After that, it will be Hong Kong although that might take a bit more time after a building collapsed at the site at the former Central Police Station just above Hollywood Road in Sheung Wan.
Thompson is leaving nothing to chance. A factory in Thailand supplies his drygoods. The street food inspired Long Chim in Australia uses Australian seafood and local organic garlic.
He said it would be very different from his Nahm restaurants in London and Bangkok.
“My food at Nahm is so rooted in the sea and anchored in the products… it's why I closed Nahm London when the quality was hard to guarantee,” Thompson told Gourmet Traveller. “But Long Chim travels as well as the people who walk along the streets.
"Really, I've lost the pretence of my erstwhile self," he says.
"Ten years ago I couldn't have imagined cooking a pad Thai, but as you get older you get more relaxed about things. Long Chim is all about easy, happy street food without the grand provenance and intellectual conceits of Nahm."
Thai food has become all the rage in the 17 years that Thompson has spent outside Australia, something he readily acknowledges.
"I'm sure there's competition but I just want to do what we do. My intention is to be as faithful, robust and casual as possible," he says.
Of course, the Long Chim dishes have a reputation of being seriously hot and spicy.
"When it's meant to have chilli it does have chilli. One or two dishes are mightily hot but there are also gentler things such as fried rice with crab, and simple grilled pork skewers you'd give to your grandmother on her deathbed,’’ he says.
by Leon Gettler, January 18th 2017
