A new restaurant from Bangkok chef Pichaya Soontornyanakij, better known as Chef Pam, opens at Crown Perth next year. It’ll be called Khao San Sek.
Chef Pam was named The World’s Best Female Chef 2025 and Asia’s Best Female Chef 2024. Her Bangkok restaurant Potong took a Michelin star in its first year of trading and reached number 13 on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2025. Perth and Sydney will be her first restaurants in Australia. Here’s what we know so far.
“Chef Pam is one of the most acclaimed chefs in the world, and we are proud to welcome her to a city so connected to Asia and that has such a strong affection for Thai flavours,” said Crown Perth CEO Brian Pereira.
The Perth venue borrows its name and its thinking from Chef Pam’s restaurant on Song Wat Road in Bangkok’s Chinatown, where the menu is organised around five ingredients she treats as sacred: rice, chilli, coconut, fish sauce, and palm sugar. Dishes are grouped by those building blocks rather than the curry-and-stir-fry categories most Thai menus fall into. The name refers to the stray grains that fall to the floor during rice milling, which are then blessed by monks.
“Opening my first Australian restaurants is incredibly meaningful,” she said. “My current venues are about respecting the foundations of Thai cuisine and expressing them in a modern and personal way. Australia’s beautiful local produce makes it the perfect destination for this next chapter.”
The Sydney restaurant, SEK, is taking a different approach: a chef-led degustation with the kitchen in full view, wine matched to each course, and a Thai dessert trolley to finish.
When Björn Frantzén’s two Australian restaurants were announced in July, Sydney got Én, a fine-dining room above the harbour, and Perth got Brasserie Astoria, the group’s more casual à la carte format.
