When I originally wrote this book, Hot Thai Kitchen was just a side hustle. I was borrowing my friend Adam’s kitchen to film videos on the weekend, and I had gone back to university to become a home economics teacher because I was done with restaurants and wanted to teach cooking instead. Today, I’m teaching cooking, just as I wanted, but in a studio instead of a school. Hot Thai Kitchen has become my main hustle, and Adam has his kitchen back.
As I reflect on how it all happened from its humble beginning, it feels rather surreal. In 2009, in my small San Francisco apartment, I filmed the first Hot Thai Kitchen video,
tom yum goong. My brother Eddie, who was also my roommate, helped film with his point-and-shoot, and I somehow managed to convince a French guy who lived in my building to make my first logo for free. I learned how to edit videos by trial and error, working well into the night and sometimes in the dark because I was too engrossed in the editing to get up and turn on the light.
For the first few years, I was working in the restaurant industry while posting videos whenever I could. I had no clear vision of what I wanted Hot Thai Kitchen to become, because being a “YouTuber” wasn’t a thing you could be yet. I just knew that I wanted to have a cooking show and that I wanted to share what real Thai cooking was, and this project ticked those boxes.
But in the years that followed, Hot Thai Kitchen grew in a way I couldn’t have imagined. When my channel reached 100,000 subscribers, a viewer commented, “Next is a million!” I remember vividly thinking, “Pfff, that is
not happening. There aren’t that many people who want to learn to cook Thai food!” I also thought that even if there were, it had taken me 8 years to get to 100,000 subscribers, so getting to a million would take me more than a lifetime. How wrong I was. As it turns out, most things in life are not linear.
It’s been an honour and a joy to be able to empower people around the world to cook the food of my home country. I’ve been brought to tears many times by stories people have shared about how my work has impacted them. Some were able to recreate long-lost dishes their Thai mother had made; others were able to relive their precious memories from Thailand. Some used my recipes to start a food business, and others were just so proud of themselves that they finally made dishes they never thought they could. Most surprising were the number of people who told me that just watching my videos, not even cooking anything, was what got them through the struggles of the COVID-19 pandemic, which for some was the darkest time they’d ever experienced.
As I wrote in my original introduction to this book, one of my main motivations for teaching Thai cooking was—and still is—to show the world what “real” Thai food is, and that it’s not the syrupy-sweet, broccoli-studded dishes that most people have access to. Almost 2 decades into Hot Thai Kitchen, I can see that authenticity in the new wave of Thai restaurants and chefs who no longer feel the need to change Thai food to please the Western palate. But the fight isn’t over. There are still too many peanut-butter-laden “Thai” recipes out there, written by people without the necessary knowledge of or respect for Thai cuisine.
This tenth-anniversary edition of my book is my continued contribution to this fight. I’m thrilled that the original edition has been embraced for so many years, and it’s a privilege to continue connecting with you through these pages. I hope the book will help you get to know Thai cuisine at a deeper, more fundamental level, including the culture and context the food exists in. In that spirit, I’ve created a new recipe chapter for this edition called “House Specials," where I’m sharing recipes that are either fan favourites you’ve loved over the years, or recipes that are under-the-radar gems that I want to teach you. Ultimately, I hope that this book will help you cook Thai food “like a Thai person,” with the right understanding and with confidence. Thank you for indulging my inner food nerd, and for your support of Hot Thai Kitchen over the years.
Copyright © 2026 by Pailin Chongchitnant. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
