Desiree and John Chantarasak, the team behind AngloThai. Courtesy Ben Broomfield

After years of popping up in various restaurants and bars around London, AngloThai decided it was time to open a permanent space. Husband-and-wife duo John and Desiree Chantarasak first announced they had found a site for the restaurant in Fitzrovia in 2022, with plans to officially open its doors the following summer. The couple worked on it for nearly a year and began hiring staff, but two weeks before Christmas, the landlord pulled the plug.

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“That was the most demoralizing feeling Des and I have had,” John tells Observer, a few days after I had dinner at the buzzy Marylebone restaurant. He says it matter-of-factly, clearly with the wisdom of hindsight. “It was the only time I ever said to her, ‘I don’t know if I can do this again.’ But we took a little bit of downtime, and it didn’t take that long for us to both realize, ‘What else are we going to do? We love this.’”

John, who has both British and Thai heritage, initially went to school for economics, but later pivoted to a culinary career. He trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Bangkok before returning to London as the chef at Som Saa. It was there he met Desiree, when a mutual friend brought her in for dinner 10 years ago. She was in the process of shifting her own career path from graphic design to becoming a sommelier.

“I went in for dinner with a friend who’d been following John’s journey,” Desiree recalls. “I walked into where they had the open grill, and I remember seeing him for the first time. And it was love at first sight. A few days later, he asked my friend for my number and asked me on a date.”

“When I met Desiree, we were in a moment of wanting to explore lots of the small underground wine bar scenes that were emerging around Europe and London,” John adds. “We spent a lot of our very early courting days in these bars, and I ended up doing pop-ups........

© Observer