Someone else cooks.
You stay at the table.
That's the whole offer. Everything below is just how much of it you want.
Private chef
There's a particular kind of evening where the food comes out of your own kitchen and you had nothing to do with any of it.
Thip arrives with the shopping already done. The kitchen fills with lemongrass and toasted rice and galangal hitting hot oil, and it keeps filling for the next hour while your guests turn up and nobody has to go check on anything. Dishes land when they're ready — hot, in sequence, on real platters — and the person who cooked them is standing right there to tell you what you're eating and where it came from.
For a day that matters. Or for a night when you'd just like to be cooked for.
He can be as present as you want him. Some tables want him in it — talking, explaining, turning the evening into a lesson if there's someone curious. Others want the food to appear and the cook to stay invisible. Say which. Either is the right answer.
Two people or twenty. A dining table, a backyard, a rented house. A birthday, an anniversary, a Tuesday.
Bring us the one we haven't cooked
Lao food is what he's known for, and Southeast Asian more widely. He also cooks Southern American food properly — a great deal of his own study has gone there.
But the requests he wants are the ones he hasn't cooked yet. Your grandmother's dish. A cuisine nobody would expect him to know. Something you've been missing for years and can't find anywhere in this city. Traditional, fused, or belonging to no category at all. Bring it. That's the best part of the job, not the hard part.
Catering
The food arrives. How much of everything else arrives with it is entirely yours to decide.
Some days want trays. Hot, generous, dropped off, gone — a backyard full of people and nothing left for you to think about.
Other days want all of it: banana leaf and proper platters, the table dressed the way the occasion deserves, and our people there to serve, refill and clear, so that nobody in your family spends the day working at their own event.
Most land somewhere in between. Birthdays, offices, temple halls, weddings, memorials. Any size, any room. Tell us what the day is and we'll tell you what it needs.
One form for both
Tick which one. The date, roughly how many, where, and anything we should know about how your people eat.
You'll get a menu back and a number. Nothing is settled until you say it is.
Before you ask
Los Angeles, and the DC area.
Holidays go earlier than anyone expects. Lao New Year, temple festivals, Thanksgiving, the whole of December — if it's on your mind now, it's already time to ask.
And if what you need is the whole event planned rather than the food — the room, the flow, the day itself — that's a different service. Head to tharathip.com.