Her first noodle shop
that her 14-year-old self could only have dreamed of. With no Dragons Den around at the time, they relied on their family and friends for fundraising. In 2016, they secured £1.8m funding from a bank to finance expansion. In 2018, they sold a majority stake in the restaurants to the US private equity firm and by February 2019, their ferocious appetite for expansion doubled the number of restaurants from eight to 16 in under two years.
Aged 14, Saiphin began her first enter- prise by setting up her own noodle shop. “Because I love noodles so much, I spent a lot of money buying noodles from the shops. I always like to trade, set it up and sell,” she shares. She proudly says that she still has the table used in her noodle shop. “When I was about seven years old, I used to help my parents in their grocery shop. I was left to sell things by myself. I grew herbs and vegetables on my own farm. One day, I was sitting in the farm and I could see something move in the sky. At the time, I didn’t know that it was an aeroplane. I was thinking, ‘why was that star moving all the time?’”
A little while later, she heard on the radio that there was a nanny job opportunity in Hong Kong. Seventeen-year-old Saiphin jumped at the chance and took a bus the city, some 70km away, for the interview. The recruitment agency told her to learn to introduce herself in English and that was the sum total of her English. At the second interview, she was asked to go for an interview in Bangkok that night. She borrowed money from her parents to take the seven-hour bus ride by herself. She says that she was the first girl in her hometown (with a population of about 6,500 people) to go away. “I just wanted to have a new adventure, to get to know the city, because I had never lived in a city before.”
The Spitalfields Café Saiphin in Petchabun kitchen
She spent the next 20 years in Hong Kong, with all its feverish energy and vi- brancy, where her entrepreneurship really took off. She went on to open her Thai grocery shop when she was 23 and even- tually opened her first Thai restaurant in Hong Kong, called TukTukThai. During our chat, she spoke some Cantonese, which she learned in Hong Kong.
Before meeting Saiphin, I was rather scep- tical as to how she could maintain the standard of cooking throughout her 16 restaurants. “The head chef from one restaurant and I would train the team at the new restaurant to cook exactly the same (as us),” she explains. Eventually, they started a central kitchen, which produces all the sauces, spring rolls, satay etc, so that “we control everything”. “I cook to my taste, not the customer’s taste. I haven’t toned down the spiciness. If they don’t ask us to put less chili in, we cook exactly the way we eat.”
Saiphin works with farmers in Thailand to produce various ingredients. Noodles and curry pastes which are freshly made twice a week are shipped over by plane. “I be- lieve in working with local people [in Thailand] to help them. The best thing is the paste, [it’s] so good, very fresh.” She tells me that in 2018 she, her husband and some staff donated two million Thai Baht (£48,600) to various causes including buy- ing equipment for a local hospital “be- cause the hospital in Thailand is so poor, especially in the northern part.” They made another donation in January 2019.
In addition to the 16 Rosa’s Thai Café sites, Saiphin also runs Lao Café, introduc- ing Laotian cuisine to Londoners. “Lao cui- sine actually is my comfort food. The food that we sell at Lao Café is what I eat with my parents. (It is) similar to north-eastern Thai food,” she says. She plans to expand Lao Café and start a new noodle shop, going back to how she first started: selling noodles, her first love, at the age of 14.
Her curiosity and drive never seems to abate. I am struck by her boundless en- ergy, new ideas, courage and resilience from a young age, especially with having to start a new life, first in Hong Kong and then England. Where did all this come from? Taking on responsibility and becom- ing self-reliant early on in life and not hav- ing many material things? Or, just following her dream?
At the end of the interview, Saiphin men- tioned that she was on her way to the Carnaby Street site to console the staff there. The head chef there passed away two days earlier after a stroke while in Thailand. She appeared moved, her eyes looking away, saying that her staff was “like family to me”. She helps out in the kitchen of the restaurants whenever they are short staffed. She also wants to show that she cares. She said that she felt bad that she could not go to the funeral in Thailand, as it was going to be on the same day as the opening of her Liverpool branch.
Saiphin’s curiosity and drive never seem to abate, not when she had to start a new life in Hong Kong and then again in England and even today as she still has plans for the next restaurants. To me, she is the embodiment that any dream can come true if you try, work hard and jump at a chance.
Terry Tong, a Hong Kong Chinese living in London and a former lawyer, is the founder of Yippie Limited. It’s website,
www.yippieonline.com has reviews of Pan-Asian restaurants across London with recommendations on dishes and blogs about the latest restaurant openings and chef interviews.
28 FOCUS The Magazine July/August 2019
www.focus-info.org
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