A taste of traditional Thailand

The space may have seen better days, but something new is stirring here. Faint strains of Thai music filter from the open kitchen into the hall to mingle with the sounds of children at play. When the food is brought out to customers, vibrant green and orange foods pop against the white rice, a clear counterpoint to the fading walls. A customer in the know would not order a cheeseburger at Da’s Thai American Cafe and Catering.

As she manned the stove and register, Chirida De Toro was dreaming of the perfect bowl of noodle soup. The broth can take more than a week to prepare traditionally, and — with working in the Rocky-Mathey Dining Hall, cooking full time at her restaurant and teaching cooking classes — De Toro, or “Da,” as her customers and family call her, has trouble finding the time. “It’s hard to finish the process,” she said with a shrug and a smile during a quick break between the lunch and dinner rushes at Da’s. “I can feed a hundred people, but I cannot cook for myself.”

De Toro, who came to the United States from Thailand in 2001, worked in several different restaurants and taught cooking classes before starting to work in Rocky-Mathey. In 2007, she opened her own restaurant.

Between the dining hall and her restaurant, De Toro feeds far more than 100 people each day. Despite being trained in fine Thai cooking, she said she enjoys working in the dining hall, which she views as her time to relax. “It’s fun, but at the same time, we’re doing the same job everyday,” she said. “It’s like vacation time. My mind can shut off.”

De Toro originally started working for the University as to help make ends meet and to ensure that her family had health insurance. But the benefits, she said, have gone far beyond that. The University offers English classes to all of its employees, which De Toro, who came to America speaking very little English, said she found invaluable. More importantly, she said, working in the dining hall taught her the importance of having vegan and vegetarian options on the menu. “I steal a lot of good techniques [from the dining hall],” she said, explaining that she recently invented a fish sauce substitute that can be made without using animal products. “Sometimes people don’t even know it’s vegetarian.”

The few students who venture to Da’s, distanced from more popular options on Nassau Street, consider it a hidden gem.

De Toro is not here solely to make a living or feed culturally curious Americans a simplified version of her homeland’s cuisine. De Toro is recreating the type of Thai cooking that she said she believes is slowly being abandoned in Thailand. “Even in Thailand, Thai [dishes] don’t even taste the way I wanted them to,” she said. “Everyone wants to have their lives easier. With technology, it’s started to change.”

De Toro’s face saddened as she described how more people are turning to store-bought food and ingredients such as chili paste instead of making their own. This, she said, is not the Thai way of doing things. “I try to present it here. This is what the Thai food started as. This is how we did it,” she explained.

De Toro learned traditional cooking as a young girl at her grandmother’s side in the small mountain village in northern Thailand where she grew up while her mother lived and worked hours away. “Every morning I would spend time with her,” De Toro said. “She’d hand me a mortar and pestle and say, ‘Here.’ I’d sit and listen to her.” As a young girl, De Toro didn’t realize what she was being given, she said. “She was the one who taught me all the basic cooking, the pace, the technique. I didn’t realize how important it was.”

These basic techniques, which more modern chefs now rarely use, allowed De Toro to achieve a Certificate of Mastery in Royal Thai cooking from the Thai Ministry of Labor in an exam that often trips up more experienced chefs. “For me, the first time it was stressful,” she said of the exam process. “Once I started cooking, it felt like my grandmother was [at the examination]. [I thought], ‘I’ve got to do it the right way.’ ”

Every dish has a story, De Toro said. Her papaya salad is made according to a song her grandmother taught her, which starts with gathering the papaya from the jungle and ends with instructions on how to present the dish. “[To cook Thai food], the person has got to be open in their mind,” she explained. “Each time I show [my chefs] the dish, I tell them the story. If [they] just know the step, but [they] don’t know the background, they come into my kitchen, then start jumping around.”

When looking for new chefs, De Toro prioritizes open-mindedness and willingness to listen over a background in Thai cooking, she said. “[Working in the kitchen], we have an Egyptian South Africa, a Guatemalan refugee and a recovering drug addict,” she said. “All kinds of people.”

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

She added that she used to have more Thai chefs on staff at her restaurant, but had problems getting the food the way she wanted it. “I’m just really strict on the taste,” she explained. “If they change it, I’m going to know that.” Some of the chefs she tried out had a hard time listening to her because of her age. “If someone is older than me in Thailand, I have to listen to them.”

As a young woman in her mid-twenties living in Thailand, De Toro struggled to get people to listen to her culinary philosophy. She tried many times to get a job or apprenticeship in the better restaurants in Thailand, but was turned away because of her gender and age. “A 28-year-old in Thailand, they aren’t serious. They don’t want to do much. But I am serious; I am serious about cooking,” she said. “Not everyone will let you prove that.”

Coming to the United States gave De Toro the opportunity to prove herself as a chef and to teach traditional techniques to a more willing audience. Once a week, roughly 15 students from the Princeton Adult School filter into De Toro’s kitchen to learn the Royal Thai style of cooking.

“The cooking classes are my favorite. I look forward to it,” she explained. “People will sit down and listen to the way I’m expressing my food and culture.” De Toro said her way of cooking offers something unique, even if she had to come all the way to the United States to show it. “All of the skipped steps, it’s valuable here.”

De Toro may be cooking Thai food like her grandmother, but she’s stepped into a very unconventional role for a Thai woman: She is running a business, while her husband cares for their two children.

Though she has scores of satisfied customers, she is always striving for improvement both professionally and personally, she said. Now, she’s thinking of business school. “I want to open my mind,” she said. “Maybe I could do it online.” Ten years ago, she had never even used a keyboard.