Monks in the house!
A few mornings ago. Near Yonge and Lawrence. A fresh rain had just created a gauze outside. Inside: the kiss and whiff of kaffir lime and tamarind and fresh lemongrass.
Having long been a decoder of “hot spots” and a whole soup of “boldface,” it had fallen upon me this week to track the orange-robed holy men setting off for lunch on a varied stretch of Toronto boasting storefronts that read Gentle Care Cleaners and Crazy Nails and Fair Catch Fishmongers.
Their target: the newish, big-hearted Pii Nong, a restaurant that’s that and so much more. A 10,000-square-foot multi-concept, really, consisting of eatery, Thai-focused market and — coming soon — even a Thai spa.
“They come every week,” owner Thomas Ha told me, as we watched a quartet of monks, including one in an orange toque, embark on a ceremony marking the final day of Songkran, the Thai new year. As they unravelled a ball of string that connected them all and then broke into chanting, it was a moment for reflection and gratitude. And then they ate! Oh, did they eat.
Pii Nong herself — the woman whose name graces the spot and who might be the peppiest chef in Toronto — promptly set off a barrage of dishes. “Morning Glory.” “Songkran Beef Boat Noodle Pot.” “Pad Prik King Pork Belly.” Some fresh Thai durian, of course, among other plates.
“They eat everything,” Nong told me in her halting English of these Theravada Buddhist monks. The feast: meant to sustain because, as of 12:30 p.m., they would be back to subsisting only on liquids — “no bite,” she emphasized — until the next morning.
“They have a certain window,” Ha added about the monks who live inside the Yanviriya Buddhist Temple in Richmond Hill and infrequently wander outside.
If it’s good enough for the monks … well.
Not only is this restaurant a draw for both the religious and the gluttonous, with its large, glistening menu, but it is — as I found out — a fascinating laboratory for one of the unlikeliest restaurateur/head chef twosomes in town.
A buddy movie waiting to happen, if you will: this pair that sat down with me to talk as those monks carried on. Ha, a 31-year-old one-time corporate bro who grew up here, and Nong, the 57-year-old ball of fire who got her tutelage on the streets of Bangkok, working a street stall, and who started cooking at the knee of her mother when she was four years old.
Divided by language and generation, among other things, they’ve managed to make it work. How?
“I hired her without even trying her food,” Ha mentioned at one point, astonishing me a tad. “Because,” he continued, “I could see her heart.”
Long story shortish: he was working in corporate when he decided to quit his job several years ago and get into the “family business” (his father owns the much-adored Saigon Star in Richmond Hill).
Looking for a chef, he asked a cooking instructor he knew for help. She forwarded a number of contacts and CVs.
“None of that matched my vibe,” he said. She finally told him she had one last rec: a woman who was the best chef of all and had been working as a cook in a restaurant downtown since arriving in Toronto in 2010. There was one hitch, though: she didn’t speak English.
In that first meeting between Ha and Nong, he opened a laptop as a means of communication. “It was all Google Translate!”
“I knew she was the one,” he said, “because she already had a whole book of her menu and recipes. No one else had that! Everyone just came in with a price tag: pay me this much!”
He leaned in to show me photos of the book, page after page in delicate Thai script.
Things were not all hunky-dory, they readily admit, however, starting at their original Pii Nong location on Bayview. “To be honest, when we first opened the restaurant, it was tough. She was so passionate and would say: ‘You’re just a Canadian-born kid. You don’t know s—t about Thai food. Why are you telling me to change my flavours?’”
They had to find a way to negotiate: match profit margins and her own ideals. Adjust her curries, for instance, which, as they are in Bangkok, were soupier, not as thick. “Almost like water.” They adjusted, thickening it with coconut, because diners here “want something that will coat the rice.”
“Your Tom Yum Soup is amazing, but it is too powerful. Too salty, too everything,” Ha remembers telling her one day. She walked out! “I had to chase her!” he recalled, as they both laughed.
There were growing pains, for sure, in that she’d never been a head chef and never had experience leading a kitchen.
There is also the fact that Nong lives at the 401 and Weston Road, a two-hour TTC ride back and forth that she insists on taking.
A big moment: when her mother died back home four months after she started working for Ha. “I remember this moment. It was 2 o’clock in the afternoon here and she was stir-frying some paste. One hand on the phone, crying, and the other hand on the curry.”
Ha asked her if she wanted to fly back. She was torn, but decided not to. Was committed to staying in the kitchen.
“In the very beginning, she may not have liked me very much,” Ha confessed, being real. Nong laughed again, her face a planet of pride — a woman who made it happen and even has equity in the restaurant now.
She likes to “be busy,” she said.
Indeed, when she is not leading her kitchen, she’ll be doing massages for select VIP clients at the spa set to open next month. Nong is a trained masseuse, too, as it happens. Of course she is.
As the monks were winding down their lunch, four massage beds were being delivered, in fact, to the location. A funny confluence.
“There’s a lot going on,” Ha laughed.
A parting thought: “Working with Nong, I have learned that when you have that passion and determination, anything is possible.”
