Nari pushes Thai to new places
Bartender Daniel Kuh makes a drink at the bar and lounge at Nari, a new San Francisco restaurant.
The Thai dish mah hor typically features minced pork, shrimp and peanuts on top of pineapple. At Pim Techamuanvivit’s new San Francisco restaurant Nari, the same mix will crown locally grown pluots.
The ingredients may be different, but the overall expression — sweet, salty, savory and sour all in one bite — is the same.
“You wouldn’t find it in Thailand, but it’s a Thai dish,” Techamuanvivit said.
That’s Techamuanvivit’s focus with Nari, a tribute to Thai women located inside Japantown’s Hotel Kabuki. She’s working with local farmers to find crafty substitutions for Thai ingredients, creating fresh and seasonal Thai fare in an airy, greenhouseinspired space.
The 100seat, twolevel restaurant opens for dinner Friday, with lunch on the way.
Techamuanvivit introduced San Francisco to her bold, funky Thai flavors at Kin Khao near Union Square in 2014; it soon garnered a Michelin star. Four years later, she took over the kitchen at
Nahm, the renowned restaurant in Bangkok, and this year opened Kamin, a Thaiinspired eatery within the Manufactory Food Hall at San Francisco International Airport.
At Nari, the Bangkokborn chef branches out significantly from Kin Khao, which has been so successful that it has been difficult to stray from the hits. The menu is packed with staple dishes, from the mushroom curry mousse with rice cakes to the caramelized pork belly — and it’s all engineered to maximize Kin Khao’s tiny kitchen.
But Nari, as Techamuanvivit says, “has an actual kitchen.”
“This is an opportunity to up the game and show people what Thai food can really be,” she said. “Here you’ll see a different side of my food — a little more feminine and delicate.”
With more room to play, Techamuanvivit says she’s able to present dishes more thoughtfully and experiment with new components, like a vegan fish sauce made with seaweed. She can incorporate more of California’s seasonal produce in an everevolving menu — the current version, for example, includes lamb shank massaman curry with nectarines. Familystyle entrees cost roughly $30 to $40.
Kin Khao has always offered just two desserts — black rice pudding and softserve ice cream — but Nari will offer a host of beautifully plated sweets, such as a makrut lime tart topped with fruity cereal and tarorice flour dumplings in warm, sweetsalty coconut cream with frozen raspberries and crispy rice.
There’s also a longer wine list, a more ambitious cocktail program and a separate bar area located upstairs, seating about 40 in a lounge setting next to a spacious private dining room. The full dinner menu isn’t available upstairs but several snacks are on offer, including the pluot mah hor and gaeng gradang bites, fried spheres of northern Thai headcheese.
The cocktail list is broken up into four sections: standard cocktails, largeformat jugs of punch, lowalcohol cocktails and zeroproof cocktails. Many of them feature southeast Asian ingredients, such as bird’seye chili, passion fruit and pandan. All are named after female characters from old Thai literature. Viyada, a character whose name literally means “aroma from floral paradise,” is represented through pineapple rum, arrak, pandan, jackfruit and lime bitters. Like the character Illa, a prince who gets turned into a woman, the cocktail isn’t what it seems to be: a nonalcoholic pour of spiced Seedlip, lime, passion fruit, orgeat and bitters.
The names are one cheeky nod to Nari’s overarching theme. More than half of the management team are women — led by chef de cuisine Meghan Clark, who came over from Kin Khao, and bar manager Megan DanielHoang, most recently of Whitechapel.
Techamuanvivit worked with women, including Caroline Nassif of Lundberg Design and ceramicist Nathiya Prathnadi, to create Nari’s elegant aesthetic. The room features raw Thai silk, tons of plants, lamps resembling jellyfish, and reclaimed wood from old Thai houses and boats. Thai numerals are laseretched into wooden tables, creating a soft, swirling motif throughout the room.
“To me, it feels very Thai,” Techamuanvivit said with a laugh, “even though you don’t see a Buddha anywhere.”
Nari: 1625 Post St., San Francisco. Open daily from 5:30 to 10 p.m. starting Aug. 9. Reservations will be available on Resy.