Feed your MIND
Lom Wong pop-up offers cultural lessons
For a while, their intimate, reservation-only events were one of the best-guarded secrets among Phoenix food geeks.
In early 2019, self-taught chefs Yotaka Promtun-Martin and her husband, Alex Martin, launched Lom Wong, an East Valley dinner series that offers Thai food like no other restaurant in metro Phoenix.
The Scottsdale couple drew from years of experience cooking and exploring regional cuisines in Thailand, harvesting food from Yotaka’s family farm in the north and from the Andaman Sea in the south.
They pounded chilies for nam phrik ong, a tomato and minced pork dip served with sticky rice, vegetables and home-fried pork rinds. They cooked coconut crab curry as taught by the sea-faring Moklen, an Indigenous group they worked within southern Thailand.
For dessert, they made sandwiches with homemade ice cream and toasted peanuts, an interpretation of the ones sold by motorbike vendors across Thai villages. Alex, a former bartender, came up with cocktails to accompany the courses.
“We are celebrating the diverse people and culture of Thailand,” Yotaka said. “‘Lom wong’ means to eat together in a circle, so that warm feeling of getting to cook and eat with someone. The idea is that we cook for you like you’re our family, and being really sincere to the people who have really honored us to cook their food.”
What inspired the couple to launch the pop-up
In January 2020, the couple had just wrapped up a year of hosting dinner events in Scottsdale and headed out on a two-month trip to Thailand.
In the south, they harvested oysters and collected seaweed with the Moklen people, caught fish and crabs in the mangrove forests. In Chiang Rai province where Yotaka grew up, they made their own tubs of curry paste and sun-dried strips of water buffalo jerky. In their final week, they gathered with Yotaka’s family over mu kratha, a combination of hot pot and barbecue.
In March, the Arizona they returned to was far different from the one they had left. Arizona had entered a state of emergency because of the COVID-19 health crisis. With hospitalizations rising, popup dinners were out of the question.
So a few months later, Yotaka and Alex made an adjustment. They would start small with a takeout fundraiser series for the Moklen community, beginning with 20 two-person portions of khao soi that could be assembled at home.
Yotaka and Alex rolled and cut the chewy egg noodles by hand, made the yellow curry broth and coconut milk from scratch, and threw in sample bottles of pomelo bitters, made with pomelos from their own citrus garden and herbs from Yotaka’s home village Sanmaket. Pounding out ingredients for curry paste or nam prik, a long and physical labor, feels like meditation, she described.
Since then, Lom Wong has continued to roll out weekly set menus, released in a newsletter ahead of the Friday pickup window. Alex and Yotaka believe whole-heartedly that every ingredient in every dish has a good reason for being there.
‘It’s important to learn about people and cultures’
Much of what the couple hopes to accomplish with Lom Wong can be traced to their direct experiences in Thailand.
Yotaka grew up on her grandparents’ farm in Chiang Rai province where her tasks included picking the leaves off the longan harvest, separating the good fruit from the bad. They grew everything without artificial pesticides, from the tamarind trees to the herbs, and used the manure from their own cows as fertilizer, she described.
Yotaka wants Lom Wong to have the same feeling as the everyday occasions when she and her extended family, up to 20 at a time, would gather to eat homecooked meals made from scratch.
“My family doesn’t say ‘hello, how are you,’ we say ‘have you eaten?’” Yotaka said.
Alex lived in Thailand for about 12 years, where he learned to speak Thai, graduated with a master’s in Southeast Asian studies and met Yotaka, whom he calls Sunny, in Chiang Mai. He was introduced to Moklen-style cooking in 2017 when he was leading study abroad trips focused on sustainable development and social justice.
The Moklen people make up an Indigenous fishing community that has lived for generations on the coast of the southern Thai peninsula. For years, the Moklen have pushed up against sprawling luxury resorts that restrict access to their ancestral burial grounds and threaten their traditional way of life.
When Alex and Yotaka began moving to the United States, they thought about ways to raise both money and awareness for the Moklen community through food.
“It’s important to learn about people and cultures who’ve had generations of experience doing this thing so we do justice for who they are,” Alex said. “Thailand is where Sunny’s from. Thailand was home for me and influenced my life in more ways I can describe. Having that connection is important for us to maintain.”
How to order from Lom Wong
Alex said they definitely want to open a restaurant and in a perfect world they’d open it as early as the end of 2021. But right now with a pandemic there are factors out of their control.
“The thing we really want to keep is this educational aspect that when you’re eating with us, you’re stepping into our world a little bit, a place where we can be really inquisitive and ask questions,” Alex said. “For people who want to dig deeper in the culinary history or cultural aspect, we’ll try to find you an answer.”
In the meantime, people can sign up for the Lom Wong newsletter to learn about upcoming meals that will be available for purchase and pick up in south Scottsdale. Each menu comes with a backstory behind the dishes chosen. As Lom Wong is still a small, twoperson operation, limited amounts are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Past dishes have included:
● Kaeng hang le: Pork belly, fermented
garlic and ginger in a tamarind sauce.
● Yum sabai: Moklen seaweed salad with homemade prik gaeng, toasted coconut, cilantro, shallots and anchovies.
● Gai yang: Grilled chicken marinated in cilantro, oyster sauce, black pepper, garlic and turmeric, served with jim jaew (tamarind and toasted rice dip).
● Tom jeud taengkwa yat sai: Soup with cucumbers stuffed with minced pork and glass noodles, topped with scallions and crispy garlic.
Customers will receive the exact address after purchase. Meals are typically available in a set menu of three dishes with rotating themes each week.
Details: Lom Wong, lomwongaz.com. Follow what Yotaka and Alex are cooking at instagram.com/lomwongaz.