Chef Chudaree "Tam" Debhakam, the only Thai female chef with two Michelin stars for her fine dining restaurant, has been honoured with the title of Asia's Best Female Chef 2025 by Asia's 50 Best Restaurants.
Chef Tam is chef-patron of Baan Tepa, which ranks No.42 on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2024 list. The award, which will be presented on March 25 in Seoul, South Korea, celebrates women in gastronomy, who persist in pushing the limits of excellence through their skills, expertise and artistry.
Salted duck egg and squid Dong Dang noodles. (Photos courtesy of Baan Tepa)
This is also the second consecutive year that two Thai chefs have won the award, last year being chef Pichaya "Pam" Soontornyanakij of the Michelin-starred Potong.
“It’s a pretty big deal and exciting for the Thai dining scene. I think it’s pretty cool for Asia’s 50 Best to recognise Thai chefs in this way. It is pretty overwhelming,” says chef Tam.
"When they called and told me I was getting this award, I did not even know how to react. It was just humbling. It was definitely a nice feeling. I'm just proud of the team because everything that we've done so far, it's not me at all, it's the people who have supported me. I'm able to do all the things that I do because I have the support behind me. I think this one is also for the team.
“I feel that so much in this industry is not about one person. It's why I got into it in the first place is because it resembled being on a team like in sports and that's how I still feel about it. So it's definitely something that we're all proud of as a team and to have the work and the vision that we came up with be recognised is pretty awesome.”
Baan Tepa.
Sports has always played a part of chef Tam’s life being an athlete herself: “Originally, I wanted to go into sports science and wanted to compete, but moving abroad I realised that whatever competition we had in Thailand, the level abroad was way higher. So I couldn't really compete and also lacked the skills. I then decided to go into nutrition and food science. That sort of led me to cooking because in nutrition you have to portion and measure your protein intake, carbohydrate intake and all that. So I started cooking and then I realised how terrible I was at it.
“One summer, my mom got me a job at a friend’s French restaurant. I really enjoyed it and that was sort of the turning point for me. I realised I really liked being in the kitchen, which also reminded me a lot of doing team sports. The pressure, the time constraints and everything having to be perfect. I just love that. So I had this seed in my mind.
“After I graduated, I got a job at the Water Library in Chamchuri Square for about eight months. There, I got my butt kicked hard, so hard that I used to cry going home because I didn't understand. I realised I needed basic training. So I looked up courses in the US because I wanted to go to New York. It was a six-month course at the French Culinary Institute, but I ended up staying for three years.”
Blackened eggfruit, banana, lime and sapodilla curry.
Food has always been more about nutrition for chef Tam and that really drove home when she worked with chef Dan Barber at Blue Hill at Stone Barns.
“It was there that I learned that nutrition and flavours correlate. When you eat something that's super green, it’s so flavourful and tasty, and the nutrition quality is very high, as well. That excites me,” says the chef.
Back in Thailand, chef Tam won Top Chef in 2017 and quickly rose to fame. She opened Tepa Garden in her grandmother’s home, which is an urban farm that practices rotational farming and provides native varieties of herbs and vegetables to her 12-seater Tepa Kitchen.
“I did not do Thai food; I did not know how to cook Thai food. I just grew up eating it. When you are only 12 seats, it is very private and I could do what I wanted. But I grew more and more interested in cooking Thai food, because I had just moved back from the US and was travelling around eating more Thai food and learning about the different varieties of Thai cuisine around the country.”
However, to say that she cooks traditional Thai food is “very far fetched”, having never been to Thai culinary school or never worked in a Thai restaurant. As the chef says: “I only know it by tongue”.
Baan Tepa garden.
“As we developed, I fell more in love with the thought-process behind Thai food, the flavour-building and the cooking techniques. I wanted to explore that,” she adds.
“I had to look internally and re-evaluate what I was about, what the my food was about and send a very clear message. I realised that the flavours of Thai cuisine resonate with me. That is what I want to do. But it doesn't have to be traditional by any means. It doesn't have to be what people would expect to be Thai, but it's tied to me and it's tied to us, all the people who are here. So it just made me focus in the direction I wanted to go and what I wanted to do with the cuisine here.”
Baan Tepa Culinary Space opened in 2020, creating a restaurant and garden experience that champions local produce and Thai biodiversity.
“At Baan Tepa, we had a goal in mind when we first opened; we wanted to explore the possibilities of Thai ingredients. Sourcing and showcasing lesser-known Thai ingredients is key for us. These are ingredients or produce that we find on our trips visiting different regions around Thailand and we bring them back to Baan Tepa and present them in a more creative, modern and fun way. It can be Thai, it cannot be Thai, but at the end of the day, our goal is to put those products back on the map,” says chef Tam.
“If you eat any of the curries at Baan Tepa or the relishes, they are not traditional by any means. I just use the technique; I understand the recipes and then do it in a way that we like or it makes sense to us. So I don't know how Thai you’d want to call it.
“If you think about sourcing locally, then you have to understand the way food systems work in Thailand. You have to understand the agriculture and the logistical issues of transporting food. This is why we had the garden from the beginning because I knew how hard it was to have a farm in Doi Saket that had really nice vegetables and getting the same quality in Bangkok would be quite hard. So I started growing some here and asking for seeds and started planting more varieties of different things that you wouldn't find in the wet markets of Bangkok.”
Though through the years with climate change and Bangkok’s notorious pollution, it has become challenging for the chef to grow anything in the capital. There have been seasons where the garden has not grown any quality produce.
“We also have to be wary of the plants being attacked by aphids and realised they were not strong from the roots. We learn as we go about the insects and the dramatic climate changes, which affect us. Even with the rain, the roots go rotten easily when it's too wet, so we had to construct barriers," says chef Tam.
This is not only a problem for Tepa Garden but also when sourcing from producers. “We are waiting for the filament for a rose apple plant, but the producer said it hasn’t flowered in a few years.”
Baan Tepa also has an annual “Meet The Producers” market, which is a way to get the chefs, public and producers to interact with each other.
“It’s a good chance for the producers to see what other people are doing, even if it's just the packaging or the idea behind the dishes. We also have producers come in and do a little talk or a tasting session, which often leads to a Q&A session. That exchange is very important for me,” says chef Tam.
“Diners are so experienced now and travel so much, eat so much and have access to high quality ingredients, no matter where they are in the world. How do we compete?”
This is, perhaps, why one of her signature dishes is the Dong Dang noodles.
“I think it's the ‘how it began’ that stuck with me in my heart. We were thinking about making a starchy dish that wasn't rice and were looking at different Thai noodles. I first saw these noodles on YouTube and thought, ‘That looks wild'."
“We used to allow staff to bring 7-Eleven coffee cups to work and used to have a lot of them. To combat the waste, we started drilling holes into the bottom, to press the noodle dough through. What is a better way to use leftover coffee cups? That’s how we started making these Dong Dang noodle utensils. It was just a cute thing, like all of us trying to make holes and pressing the dough through. Now we have something a little bit more professional, but it was the beginning of something that is memorable and a happy moment with the team,” says the chef.
The dish changes with the seasons and available ingredients. In its current form, the noodles are made from rice and tapioca flour. The sauce is made with salted duck eggs, sourced from a soy sauce factory in Bangkok, which uses leftover lees to age the eggs.
“What you get is salted duck eggs that are filled with umami from the lees and the wood-fire ash, both by-products from soy sauce production. The dish also has sun-dried squid from Satun province and crispy squid, made with all the trimmings,” explains the chef.
Baan Tepa has been open for four-and-a-half years and as the chef says, they did not know what to expect.
“When we designed it, I had no idea how to run a restaurant, so everything was very open and we could adjust it all. Now, however, we understand the type of service and experience we want to deliver so we are going to redesign it and renovate if only to make it more homey, make the flow of everything smoother and a little bit more efficient and nicer for diners. We also want to add a wine cellar on the second floor to showcase our wines. But all this will probably be in 2026,” says chef Tam.
“We also need more space for compost, because we generate eight to 12kg of food waste daily. We need to allocate a bit more space to compost properly and maybe some equipment to break down some of the food. It's a very labour intensive and time-consuming process to create your own compost. People don't realise this. Everyone is like ‘sustainability’, ‘green star’ — all these things. I have 54 staff on site and only four of them are responsible for separating and recycling trash. The organisation of all this is insane.
“We also want a space for activities like hosting the producers, a butchery class for small scale farms or even cooks. We also want a fermentation room. We want the public and cooks around Thailand to have access to all this. So that's what I want to build in the back. I want to make it a cafe, a research space, classroom, workshop — just very focused on food education.
“I really want the space to be used for research and development of Thai ingredients and produce, to further the possibilities of any Thai ingredient.”
