Tommy Tang: The Father of Modern Thai Cuisine

Tommy Tang’s breezy, animated celebrity-filled restaurant began his reputation for serving the best modern Thai cuisine even though he was the mastermind behind the rise to success of .  Just as the restaurant catapulted Melrose Avenue to international fame, so Tommy introduced and ignited the public’s love for modern Thai cuisine through personal appearances, his eponymous book, PBS Show, and his line of seasonings and sauces.  As the eldest son of a chef whose cafe and house burned to the ground in his native Thailand when he was eight years old, Tommy began working to support his family — and hasn’t really stopped since.  Tommy supported his family of nine with jobs ranging from factory and contruction worker to phone operator and entreprenurial tour guide before he reached his teens.  And it was as a small, agile welder sent up on the high beams at building sites, that Tommy found his trademark colorful head bandana that still identifies him instantaneously today.

Tommy worked his way to America,  earned himself a college degree (on a basketball scholarship in Blythe, Calfiornia) and began carving out a career for himself as a rock music manager, continuing to cook his beloved Thai food for anyone who would watch and eat. When Chan Dara opened in Hollywood, Tommy as chef put the place on the culinary map and realized that his way to America’s economic heart was through its stomach, not through music.  So he kept the rock and roll in his cuisine and opened the Melrose restaurant in 1982.   With wife Sandi,  he built a business that now included the Tommy Tang Global Cuisine Catering – known for    The catering company prepared scrumptious international cuisine and has cooked for as many as 15,000 people (in New York City, where the kitchen took up an entire closed off side street).  Tommy’s  community and charity contributions are international.  They include working with Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crysal and Robin Williams at Comic Relief and the new Tsunami Foundation dedicated to young victims in Thailand

Today Tommy is famous for:

-Pioneering  the world famous  Melrose Avenue dining and shopping scene with the high style Tommy Tang’s Modern Thai Cuisine which still attract a devoted following of celebrity and neighborhood clientele

-The first chef to have his own PBS cooking show, about to start its 4th season

-The first chef to have his own international line of Thai Seasonings and Sauces

-The first bi-coastal chef

-Tommy Tang’s Global Cuisine Catering company

-His best selling cookbook,  Modern Thai Cuisine (second book to come out)

.