At AngloThai, Michelin-starred mere months after unbolting its doors, Desiree Chantarasak assembles a wine list as provocative as the dishes it amplifies. Once a designer, she now delves into the liquid soul of bottles, including a brace named after her children. Amid the furnace of restaurant life, she maintains the equilibrium of family, ferment, and grace under pressure: a woman who has rewritten the sommelier’s script with verve, vinyl, and a corkscrew…
A crab broth, deepened with eel stock and haloed by marigold, opens proceedings like the curtain-raiser to an obscure arthouse film: bold, bewildering, and unrepentant. If you’re still seated after the first spoonful, you deserve to see how this ends. Then: a sea buckthorn margarita – mezcal-led, Chinotto-splashed, verjus-laced – and a teetotal Paloma which makes sobriety taste almost illicit. Later, a timeworn amber Chardonnay from Slovenia – Walter Mlečnik’s ruminative elixir – curls up beside Blythburgh pork, scallop roe and a smoked chilli relish which one critic called ‘fiendishly complex.’
Desiree did not spring from hospitality’s conventional incubators. Her first act unfolded in the tasteful composure of Country & Town House, followed by an interlude at Amazon, where human warmth was algorithmic at best. But fate, ever the playful arsonist, struck at Climpson’s Arch. There stood John Chantarasak – half-Thai, half-British, a culinary dual citizen – stoking Som Saa’s coals during its pre-Brat heyday. ‘John introduced me to the world of hospitality – such a welcoming community,’ she says.
What followed was not just love, but mutual fascination. They married, dreamed aloud, drank deeply at P. Franco, schemed over stemware, and eventually opened.
Design with Soul, Fire in the Kitchen
The Marylebone premises, formerly The Gate – a temple to tofu and turmeric juice – was reborn by Thai-American designer, May Redding. Her interiors read like a love letter to controlled disorder: Chamchuri wood tables, an abstract painting by a Chiang Mai reiki healer, Welsh pottery, and 1970s Tannoy Devon speakers which pulse as much as the diners. The result: a room with the lived-in warmth of a home which loves you back. It’s a soft foil to the pyrotechnics and chilli pepper pep of the kitchen.
Desiree speaks for the wine with discreet authority, never brash, rarely predictable, aided by assistant sommelier and writer, Nicole Ritchie (formerly of Noble Rot). Sourcing comes courtesy of Modal, Newcomer and Howard Ripley. The cellar may be small in scale, but its contents have spines. ‘We champion personality,’ she notes. ‘Super simplistic wines get lost alongside John’s food.’
Her palate was tempered, in part, by Peter Honegger of Newcomer Wines, whose Dalston bar hosted a defining lockdown residency. ‘Peter asked the right questions,’ she recalls. It was there her compass tilted Austria-ward – specifically towards the fastidious, biodynamic duo, Josef Schenter and Julia Nather of Nibiru in Kamptal. ‘People who live the way they make wine.’ They’ve become the spiritual godparents of two expressions, bottled in litre format, and named after the couple’s children. ‘Rufus’ – a gloriously strange trio of Merlot, Zweigelt and Müller-Thurgau – is textured, loquacious. ‘Aubrieta,’ after the resilient purple flower in Desiree’s mother’s garden, collages Müller-Thurgau with Gelber Muskateller. ‘Josef saved the 2019 vintage for us when we lost out on a site. That loyalty still moves me.’
Among her favoured pairings: jungle curry ox tongue – a slow-cooked throb of a dish, best mopped up with hand-torn brioche glazed in butter – met by ‘Naturaleza Salvaje’, a punk-souled Clarete from Navarra. This riotous co-ferment of Garnatxa Blanca, Garnatxa Azul and Garanza, raised in clay, tastes like it was bottled in Doc Martens.
There is no place on her list for whites which are dry, joyless, and bone-thin. ‘I like wines which say something.’ The same standard is applied to rosé. Instead of the pallid parade from Provence, she pours Ben Walgate’s Sussex-born Pinot Meunier saignée. ‘The depth, precision and elegance of his wines are fantastic. Champion personality!’
While working, mothering and surviving, Desiree studied wine – WSET, evenings and weekends. ‘To understand the rules before I broke them.’ This foundation led to a stint at what is now Divine Cellars in Clapham. ‘In Marylebone, with a premium clientele, that foundation matters,’ she says. ‘You work out which gaps need filling.’
The list remains European by design. ‘It’s not anti-New World’ so much as a quest for coherence. AngloThai is deeply local. Ingredients include black-faced Hebridean sheep from Ryall Farm in Dorset, farmed by Desiree’s family, wild-caught monkfish from Devon, Suffolk-grown holy basil, and ancient grains – all nurtured on British soil. As for the wines: ‘There’s so much nearby worth shouting about.’
Vision, Grit and Flower-Shaped Crackers
Desiree walks the fine wire between sommelier and mother. ‘You can have a family and be in this world,’ she says, naming friend and fellow parent, Emily Acha Derrington, wine director at Manteca and Oma. ‘It is possible.’
She and John are two halves of a circuit. ‘John always calls me the ying to his yang. He’s focused on the kitchen and I’ve been more front of house and drinks. We, dare I say it, cover all bases.’ And it’s not just pots and palates. ‘John has many facets,’ she adds. ‘He’s always done our finances. He has a business economics degree.’
Their path has rarely been straight. ‘But our partners, Jake and Marco at MJMK, believed in us – and in our vision.’ MJMK – the London group behind KOL, Casa do Frango, Lisboeta and Fonda – were right to back them. AngloThai was awarded its first Michelin star just three months after opening, praised for ‘reimagined and innovative dishes aplenty.’
Before finding a permanent home, the couple ran ‘Baan’, a supper club from their flat. At one dinner – Desiree, eight months pregnant – she knocked over a wine glass with her belly. ‘We’d lost sites, were doing dinners to show the press what we wanted to do,’ she recalls. That plucky initiative birthed a signature: crab, caviar and a coconut cream made in-house, served with a charcoal cracker shaped using a traditional Thai flower stamp.
Asked whom she’d most like to share a bottle with, Desiree chooses Alecia Moore – Pink, to the stage – whose Damascus sip was reportedly Château de Beaucastel. ‘She got me through many a scenario. I went to see her perform last year and was thrilled to discover she actually makes wine herself.’ Presumably, they’d uncork a bottle of the singer’s Two Wolves from Santa Barbara County. And then there’s her mother, Susan. ‘My rock. Even more so since I had children. A working woman, with many careers under her belt. “Inspiring” doesn’t even come close.’
So, what makes a great sommelier? ‘The trick,’ she says, ‘is balancing personality with purpose. Knowing when to charm, and when to sell. Be yourself, but know your margins.’
