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.

The Perth venue takes 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.

“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.”

It’s Crown’s second big signing in a month, after Brasserie Astoria from Björn Frantzén was announced for Crown Perth in July.