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Jan 22, 2024

New Houston

By all accounts, the chefs behind two Houston-area establishments are success

By all accounts, the chefs behind two Houston-area establishments are success stories.

Benchawan Jabthong Painter and husband Graham Painter run Street to Kitchen, a Thai restaurant attached to a gas station on the East End that's packed on any given night. Their don't-hold-back-on-the-heat approach to dishes popular in Benchawan's native country recently landed her a finalist nomination as the best chef in Texas for the James Beard Awards, the so-called Oscars of the food world.

David Skinner is the chef-owner behind Eculent in Kemah, a 20-seat tasting-menu restaurant that the Washington Post's Tom Sietsema raved about. The critic described his dinner there in 2019 as "tastier overall than the experimental Alinea in Chicago" — a modernist fine-dining restaurant many consider to be among the best in the country. Some diners have to book their seats a year out to secure a reservation.

Even with all their praises and accolades, both chefs homed in on a bigger goal: They wanted to cook food they had never tasted or seen on menus before.

On May 4, the Painters and Skinner will open a restaurant in Kemah dedicated to indigenous Thai and Native American cooking. Th Prsrv, their spelling of "The Preserve," is as much an ambitious, chef-driven restaurant with prix-fixe menus as it is a research project diving into old (and sometimes lost) recipes. The Painters and Skinner said their goal is to serve food from their cultural backgrounds that is rarely served in modern-day restaurants.

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Street to Kitchen owners / husband-and-wife team of Graham and Benchawan Jabthong Painter have partnered with David Skinner of Eculent hang out in a tree inside of the new restaurant Th Prsrv.

"Fourteen Dry-aged Duck" with Wojapi sauce and manoomin at the new restaurant Th Prsrv.

"Bison Striploin" features wild mushrooms and David Skinner's great grandmother's wild greens, with smoke turkey neck and confit potatoes in duck fat.

"Kanon Sai" is steamed coconut meat, sticky rice and coconut custard at the new restaurant Th Prsrv.

The "Pumpkin Flower" tepary beans with bison scrapings.

"Milk Punch" cocktail with a lemon bird garnish at the new restaurant Th Prsrv.

The "Memories of My Grandmother's Root Cellar" features pickled, and fermented vegetables with confit of duck and bison.

"Gaeng Riang Kai Mod Daeng" is a mushroom soup with red ant eggs.

Street to Kitchen chef Benchawan Jabthong Painter cooks at the new restaurant Th Prsrv.

Interior decor of the new restaurant Th Prsrv.

Two lives trees anchor the dining room at Th Prsrv.

A dessert course of butternut squash preserves with tanka bean "snow" and spruce tip syrup.

"The future of Native American and Thai food," said Graham Painter when describing the restaurant's lofty goals. "That's when the chefs really take off their gloves."

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Skinner first dined at Street to Kitchen in the fall of 2020, digging into papaya salads laced with pungent fish sauce and fiery chiles and other Thai dishes he said had never seen or tasted in Houston.

"Holy s—! This is the best Thai food I’ve had in years," Skinner recalls telling his dining companion.

Benchawan felt similarly after dining at Eculent to celebrate her birthday. The menu included dishes such as a bed of edible moss dotted with snails, truffle foam and enoki mushrooms.

"The food was different. The technique was different. It just wowed me," Benchawan said. "The way he presented everything is 100 percent different. I really wanted to learn from him."

Within a year, Skinner approached the Painters with a business proposal.

"I have this crazy idea, but let me run this by you," Skinner said. "What would you think about running a restaurant together?"

The Painters agreed. They originally wanted to open a more ambitious Thai restaurant but said the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to go ahead with Street to Kitchen.

While Benchawan aims to cook with the authenticity diners may find in Thailand, her menu — which is all cooked in a kitchen with barely enough room for three cooks — still includes the expected curries and noodle stir fries.

The tasting-menu format at Th Prsrv, which is only available through reservations, will highlight the hours of research the Painters and Skinner have put into digging up and researching recipes.

For Skinner — a member of the Choctaw Nation, the third largest Native American tribe in the U.S. — it's meant going beyond the typical fry bread associated with his heritage. Instead, Skinner has been looking for ingredients that have disappeared from the daily diet of Native Americans and even consulted a Choctaw chief as he developed his part of the menu.

It's the same detailed research Benchawan used to recreate her grandma's recipe for gaeng som, an orange curry. She wants to keep cooking dishes that serve as a reminder and tribute to her family's former restaurant in Thailand.

"We’re preserving this history of the past and bringing it to the forefront," Graham Painter said.

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The dining room, which is in the same building as Eculent at 709 Harris, is meant to evoke an enchanted forest. Strings of lights hang from an elm and pepper tree. There's a tangle of pink plastic flowers in between glass hummingbirds and three chandeliers. At times, there's a soundtrack of birds chirping in the background.

It's a whimsical escape, with most of the wooden tables and 36 seats set up for communal dining.

The menu, which will change with available ingredients and seasonality, is laid out as a timeline and reads like a history lesson as diners dig into elk tartar or a corn soup with smoked pork jowl.

Fusion is not a word the chefs use to describe their menu because each dish stands on its own, Skinner said, and pays homage to either Thai or Native American cooking.

"We’re looking into the forgotten past to create something unexpected," Painter said. "It's two unlikely cultures meeting here."

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