Grilling sizzling pork skewers outside of Thai Fresh, owner Jam Sanitchat hosted a Songkran celebration on Sunday, bringing the taste and smell of the Thai holiday to her South Austin parking lot.
Sanitchat completed her master’s in communications at UT, and while taking a gap year, she started teaching Thai cooking classes. Wanting to stick with cooking, she and her husband opened Thai Fresh in 2008.
“(In) every culture, food (brings) people together,” Sanitchat said. “Thai people in particular, I feel, from being both in Thailand and coming here, we like to feed people. That’s in our core, you can’t avoid it. … We love doing it so much that when I’m in the business of feeding people, I feel like that is the true Thai culture.”
Despite running Thai Fresh for nearly 18 years, Sanitchat only started celebrating Songkran, the Thai New Year, at her restaurant last year. Traditionally, Songkran emphasizes pouring water on your family to cleanse away the past and start the new year fresh, but Sanitchat said over the years the celebration has evolved.
“(Songkran) marks a new beginning,” Sanitchat said. “I like that it’s not a tradition or a time that people (are) gifting (to) each other, it’s a time that you actually go back to visit your family … and you still pay respect … (People) cook a meal and then they kind of gather and get together. … We just kind of cook at home, spending time with family.”
In order to bring Songkran to her restaurant, Sanitchat wanted to serve traditional Thai street food outside. Thai Fresh offered limited items such as grilled pork skewers called moo ping, chicken satay, tom yum noodles and ube and banana fritters.
Elizur Castañeda, the Thai Fresh Kitchen Manager, worked the grill and served soup during the event. Castañeda said he enjoys seeing his own culture reflected in the food he serves to customers.
“I like cooking Thai food because I’m from Mexico,” Castañeda said. “In Mexico, we ate with (spicy) chili, and Thai food is kind of the same (but) you change (the flavor a) little bit, because Thai food is sweeter and spicy, and then (in) Mexico it’s only spicy.”
In addition to all the food, Sanitchat set up buckets of water and water guns for both kids and adults to splash one another with water. Attendee Mark Bellman visited Thai Fresh for the first time on Sunday, despite living in Austin since 1989. Bellman grew up in Bangkok and said he saw the event as a great opportunity to celebrate and reconnect with familiar flavors.
“My favorite was the soup with the noodles and the pork and the fish cakes,” Bellman said. “It has that quintessential Thai fish sauce tanginess along with the savory, so I thought, ‘that’s the best.’”
Sanitchat said she hopes to make the Songkran celebration a tradition at her restaurant, wanting to share her culture more with Austin.
“I want people to see what actually happened on the street(s) of Bangkok,” Sanitchat said. “It’s like a vivid memory of seeing what’s done and how it’s done. I’m sure some of the people never had some of these foods before, … so I want people to have that memory of the taste and how it is done.”
