How AngloThai’s John and Desiree Chantarasak Turned a Pipe Dream Into a Michelin Star
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.
“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 in some of them.”
John unveiled his first AngloThai pop-up in November of 2015 at Salon in Brixton Market, not long after the couple got together.
“We liked the format of serving wines with small plates, but not being traditional in the sense of what the food has to be,” John recalls. “We didn’t want charcuterie and toast and things like that. The very early iteration of AngloThai was to open a 20-seat wine bar in Battersea, where we live, and Des will serve the wines, and I’m going to cook the food on a couple of induction burners. For a long time, that was the pipe dream.”
“It feels like quite a long time ago, but it still had the same integrity,” Desiree adds. “We were still trying to do the same thing we’re doing now.”
For years, that worked. John continued to develop his signature style of combining Thai flavors and methods with British ingredients. Desiree became more invested in learning about the available variety of wines and how they could pair with John’s dishes. But once the pandemic hit, everything fell off course. A year’s worth of pop-ups was canceled. The couple wasn’t sure where to go next, but when a group of investors approached them with the idea of moving AngloThai to central London and making it bigger, the Chantarasaks couldn’t deny that it might work.
“As someone who’s very ambitious and also as someone who constantly wants to be pushing and evolving, that was the ultimate green light,” John recalls. “It allowed me to build a team around myself. Whereas if we’d tried to do it ourselves, it would have been absolutely psychotic.”
Despite the hurdle with the original location in Fitzrovia, AngloThai opened its doors on a charming street in Marylebone in November 2024, immediately attracting guests with its refined, uniquely-flavored cuisine. Everything emphasizes John’s dual heritage, a sensibility he has embraced more over time. It’s more whimsical than pretentious, like a bread course that pairs a rich, spicy beef jungle curry with a pillowy brioche roll. Or a Carlingford oyster doused with vibrant fermented chili, one of my favorite inclusions in the meal.
“I like the idea of taking something from Thailand and then flipping it on its head a little bit,” explains John, whose father is from Thailand. “I might completely change all of the ingredients involved with it, but hopefully someone that knows the dish, especially with Thai people, can eat it and recognize it. That’s now what I find really fun.”
One particular dish has been an immediate standout since its debut four years ago: a beautifully presented tin of Brixham crab and Exmoor caviar served alongside a crispy coconut ash cracker. It’s an indulgent, well-balanced dish that follows the snacks—the sort of thing you would return for over and over again if it was offered individually. It’s so pretty that it’s no wonder it has become a viral hit. John presented an initial version during a series of press dinners the couple held at their home in Battersea while Desiree was “heavily pregnant” with their first child.
“We knew right away it was going to be a signature-style dish,” John says. “Those dinners are an example of the kind of crazy, hare-brained ideas I tend to have. What if we just hosted dinners in our dining room? Looking back, we were just so driven to make it work. We thought about what could make it interesting and personable to us. We had a ‘no fear’ policy.”
That policy remains. John and Desiree aren’t afraid to evolve or try new things. When it was clear an à la carte menu was too overwhelming for the kitchen, they shifted to a longer tasting menu at dinner and a shorter one at lunch without hesitation. John creates the music playlists himself, emphasizing a livelier atmosphere than one might expect from a fine dining spot. The restaurant’s focus on sustainability has also involved taking unique measures with traditional ingredients.
Because John wants to import as little as possible, AngloThai now makes its own oyster sauce with oysters from Ireland. The restaurant also ferments British-grown pulses to create a soy sauce-like product, and vegetable waste from the kitchen becomes a molasses. An artisan honey from Glastonbury replaces palm sugar, and there are plans for fish sauce production. The limes come from the U.K., and this summer, a British farm will begin growing all of the restaurant’s chilis. Another farm, in London, cultivates basil using seeds John got in Thailand. There is one hiccup: coconuts.
“To this day, I have yet to find anywhere in Europe that grows coconuts,” John says. “One of the linchpins of what we do at the restaurant is fresh-pressed coconut cream every week. We probably do four bags at a time, which would be 120 to 150 coconuts. And that’s done four times a week. It’s quite labor-intensive. But overall, we’re really building this eco structure. It’s going to take time, but we have done quite a lot of it quickly. I am a believer that we will get to a very sustainable viewpoint.”
Sustainability is also important in the wine offering, which Desiree is continuing to develop. She describes AngloThai’s wine menu as a “tale of two halves,” bringing together where the couple has come from and producers they’ve met over the years with elevated varietals that suit the restaurant’s new home in Marylebone. “We’re looking to find wines that have an integrity and might have biodynamic or organic practices, but are coming from more premium regions, such as Burgundy or Champagne,” she says. “A lot of the Burgundy wines really speak to our food. We’ve also built a lot of relationships with Austrian producers, and they have been instrumental in our journey. There’s a great acidity and texture that pairs with Thai food.”
The list even includes two signature white wines, Aubretia and Eleanore, created by Nibiru, a winemaking project based in Austria’s Kamptal region. “They’re named after our two children,” Desiree confirms. “We wanted it to reflect our personalities and what sort of family we are. In general, it’s about focusing on Europe and the U.K. and not sending wine across the world so as to limit our impact. We have such an amazing breadth of wines on offer close to us.”
In February, only a few months after opening, AngloThai was awarded its first Michelin star—an achievement nearly a decade in the making. Desiree describes it as a “very surreal” experience. The couple had to enlist their parents to help with childcare while they attended the ceremony in Glasgow, which John feels is important for people since it takes a lot to work in a restaurant and have a family at the same time. Both are proud they earned the accolade by doing things in their own way.
“AngloThai has been so much a part of our lives for so long,” Desiree says. “Obviously, it is incredibly hard work, because we do have two very small children. John takes on 90 percent of the restaurant, and I take on 90 percent of the family life, and then we try to balance it as much as we can outside of that. And it’s been hard—our daughter was seven months old when the restaurant opened, and I was still breastfeeding. So it’s amazing we’ve done this.”
John considers this to be only the beginning. “We’ve got such a big journey ahead of us,” he says, adding “that drives you every single day.”
“It took us so much effort just to get the doors open that we can do anything now,” he says. “We are proving that to ourselves each and every day at the restaurant. I wouldn’t ever take back that journey because I think it has brought us to where we are today. We are getting success now because we went through that very hard experience.”