Pan: The Thai Kitchen That Grows Its Own Basil Above the Carmel

The som tam arrives first and it arrives loud. Green papaya shredded to the thickness of matchsticks, pounded in the mortar until lime, fish sauce and chilli have bruised into one another, cold and sour and blazing all at once, with peanuts cracking between the teeth. Outside the window the Carmel ridge folds away toward Nesher in grey green terraces. Around you is a neighbourhood shopping centre on the upper slopes of Haifa: a gym, an ice cream counter, a clinic, a parcel desk. On the second floor, behind a doorway you could walk past twice without noticing, a cook from Udon Thani stands over a wok that has not cooled since noon. This is Pan on a Tuesday evening, and nothing about the address prepares you for the food.

Chef Pan came to Israel for love, and she says so plainly. She took a job in the kitchen of Papiano, the kosher Italian restaurant run by the same partners in the same complex, and on quiet afternoons she began cooking for the staff the food she had grown up eating. Moshe Yitach, the group's head chef, his sons Liron and Liad, Ohad Ohyon and David Tzitziashvili tasted it. Within months they had handed her a kitchen of her own and put her name above the door.