This tiny Thai restaurant brought bold flavors to the Upper East Side. Now it’s closed for good
Few South Florida restaurants produced Thai cuisine the way Chef “Cake” did in his tiny Upper East Side kitchen.
That was no fluke.
When Phuket Thongsodchareondee opened the original Cake Thai restaurant in 2014, he was out to recreate the flavors that shaped his palate and his life in Thailand. And in that six-table, strip-mall restaurant — set apart from his neighbors by a bright orange façade — he did just that for what counts as a well-lived lifetime for a Miami restaurant.
Chef Cake, 35, closed his namesake restaurant Aug. 24 after a string of failed attempts to open seven other restaurants in two years, and, finally, from the pressures of trying to operate his original location with limited resources during the coronavirus pandemic.
“It was hard to survive,” he said.
He came to Miami for survival. His family had suffered a bankruptcy in Thailand. His mother, who nicknamed him Cake for all the cake she ate during her pregnancy with him when she worked at a bakery, found him a job with friends in a Miami Thai restaurant. He was soon raising the level of cuisine at the gone-but-not-forgotten Sushi Saigon in Miami Beach which helped him land a job at the exacting Makoto Japanese restaurant in Bal Harbour.
He might have stayed there indefinitely if his mother, who later emigrated to San Francisco, had not been widowed after being married a year. He brought her to Miami and together they opened Cake Thai.
There they didn’t cave to Americanized palates. With his mother working the front, he in the kitchen, they produced dishes bursting with fresh and hard-to-find ingredients to produce the food he learned to eat as a child.
“There wasn’t a lot of real Thai food in Miami and I wanted to taste the flavors, the flavors I wanted to eat,” he said.
He brought street food and its flavors — makrut lime leaf, lemongrass, Thai basil, tamarind, cilantro — noodles and meats and curries over rice. On a separate chalkboard menu he introduced weekly dishes he knew would be new for his diners, kept the traditional names, and every bite became an adventure. It became a favorite of locals.
“I was lucky people liked my food,” he said.
He attempted to repeat the formula with two separate locations in Wynwood, a kiosk in the Lincoln Eatery, where his menus were far and away the most creative, and in several other spots that never came to fruition. Of his sleeker sequel in Wynwood, a Miami Herald food critic wrote, “With a duo of restaurants to his name and a town awakening to Chef Cake’s authentic Thai food, it looks like Miami diners will be able to have their Cake and eat it two.”
But he tried to expand too fast while overlooking some basics of business, he admitted. The original spot got dinged several times by inspectors.
“It was too fast. It’s the lesson to learn,” he said.
Chef Cake said he will remain in Miami for several months, working on pop ups such as one he has planned for early September with chef Diego Oka at La Mar. But his goal is eventually to return to Thailand, where he has not lived since he was 22, to regroup. And then, he said, he hopes to return to South Florida with his country’s flavors and better grasp of how to make them work in a restaurant.
“I think it’s a good time to learn a better system,” he said. “I decided maybe it is better to learn something new in Thailand and then come back.”
This story was originally published August 24, 2020 at 3:12 PM.
