Restaurant POTONGA five-storey shophouse with a different job on every floor

Two kinds of time in one building

Chinatown, Bangkok, Thailand — Thai-Chinese cooking in a five-storey former apothecary.

There is one menu only, built on five elements and five senses: salt, sour, spice, texture and the Maillard reaction, with every dish expected to hold on all five. Twenty courses run as a single line, and the order carries what she remembers, so whoever sets down a plate can say which year, and which person, it belongs to.

The building keeps old and new in the same frame. Bottles hang under a wooden ceiling that is a century old, and present-day tables and chairs stand beside the old medicine cabinets, with the worn signboards left where they were.

The house is where her family made Chinese medicine. Four generations lived here and worked here, and the old logo still carries the name of the medicine they prepared. More than two years of rebuilding came before the restaurant opened.

Five floors, five jobs

The building is a five-storey Sino-Portuguese shophouse, not deep from front to back. The ground floor held the counter of the medicine shop and now holds a bar, and the wooden ceiling above it is kept as it was a hundred years ago. It is the first thing overhead as guests come in.

From the second floor up the rooms are for eating: the old partitions, the windows and a small balcony onto the street all remain, long tables run along the wall, and a door at the far end opens to the street. The third floor has barely been touched, a shrine left at its centre and eight hidden tigers painted on the wooden screens for wealth and smooth passage. The fourth floor, once the room of the opium beds, is now the Opium Bar; the fifth is the roof, where the family sat out and watched the stars, with the old signboard overhead.

Lifting a kitchen into a hundred-centimetre shaft

The rebuilding took more than two years, brought in over seventy people and covered five hundred square metres. The hardest piece was hoisting nearly all the kitchen equipment up through a goods shaft a hundred centimetres square; the lift in the middle went in only afterwards.

There is a fermentation room in the building. Kombucha is fed on local Thai-Chinese fruit and herbs, the rice wine goes to a local bottling house, and two single-variety rices are poured: glutinous rice from San Pa Tong in Chiang Mai, and black glutinous rice grown at six hundred and fifty metres by Hmong people in Tak.