The lady behind the wok

As the first and only street venue in Thailand to be awarded a Michelin star, the queues outside Jay Fai’s shophouse are long as gourmets from around the world flock to taste her signature dishes. Since that win a little over a year ago, Supinya Junsuta, or Jay Fai as she is more commonly known, has been no stranger to the media but now she’s getting more exposure that she ever dreamt of with her inclusion in Netflix’ latest |documentary series “Street Food Asia”.

Netflix worked with the creators of Chef’s Table on the series, which explores the rich culture of street food in Thailand, Japan, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, and the Philippines, and goes beyond the famous dishes to the sweat and tears that has made the eateries so iconic.
Thailand opens the series and takes viewers behind the scenes to listen to the lady herself.
“I feel sorry for myself,” says Jay Fai after a long pause when asked how she feels after watching herself in the series. “It makes me look back on my life and how I’ve struggled yet I am very honoured and proud to get the Michelin star.”
Each episode of “Street Food Asia” presents three well-known street food eateries and highlights one of them, telling the story of how cooking street food began as a necessity and how through generations of refining and honouring family traditions, it became a life-long passion. In addition to Jay-Fai who taught herself to cook, we meet 100-year old Mbah Lindu in Indonesia who hasn’t changed her recipes since she started.

Jay Fai’s most famous dish Crab Meat Omlette./Netflix Photo
 

Jay Fai - the “Jay” is a familiar Chinese term for older sister and “Fai” a reference to the mole on her face - was the middle child of nine kids born to a poor family. She describes the rented house in which she grew up and “little more than a slum”, and speaks proudly of her business acumen, which started at the age of eight. A classmate whose father owned a printing company would give her pal free cartoons and the enterprising Pia, as Jay Fai is known to friends, talked that friend into a starting comic book rental business. She charged 25 satangs per book and continued her little enterprises for seven months before her teacher banned her.
“She told me that you came to school to study not to do business,” she recalls.
But that admonishment didn’t stop her looking for other jobs. She went on to help a noodle vendor in her school’s canteen, became a nanny for her teacher and helped another teacher sell curry puffs in the morning. “I just wanted to lessen my mother’s burden,” says the woman who turns 74 in June.
Pia left school when she finished Prathom 4 (Grade 4) - Thailand’s minimum compulsory education at the time – her mother giving her no choice as unless she left, her younger siblings couldn’t study. “I love studying and wanted to study more but I couldn’t,” she says.
She then took a seamstress course and started work while her mother sold chicken noodles and rice porridge on the street helped by her sisters. Her father, she says in the documentary, was an opium addict and abandoned the family when she was very young.
Her life changed again when she was in her 20s and her rented home caught fire. Losing her sewing equipment to the flames, she started looking for something else to do. In the meantime, she watched her mother and sisters cook and was so frustrated at their lack of speed, that she told them she wanted to cook. “They told me ‘no you couldn’t do it’. 
“Okay, you don’t think I can do it,” she replied and that night grabbed the wok and started stir-frying noodles. She practised every night and ate what she made. 
One night she poured oil into a wok and forgot about it. When she saw the wok was overheating, she panicked, “So I dumped it all out. I got so mad that I just threw noodles into the pan and stirred them furiously. The heat alone browned them nicely and they had such a wonderful taste and aroma.”
The next day she asked her mother to be allowed to work and thus began a whole new career. 
She has always maintained that she has a passion for every dish she cooks. “I love every dish. You have to love them, to cook them properly down to every little detail.

Selling street food is not complicated, she says, adding that the downside is that it means working well into the night. By the time she made it into her 30s, she was responsible for all the chicken noodles and often cooked until 4 or 5am and went to bed at dawn. But while she had plenty of customers, there were also disadvantages. Sometimes she couldn’t sell on the sidewalk because it was raining or was stopped by the authorities from putting out her tables. 
So she borrowed some money and bought some quality prawns, topping her rad naa (stir-fried noodles topped with gravy) that usually cost Bt20, with a giant-sized portion of seafood and selling the dish for Bt120. “I told my customers that these prawns were totally different. One customer ate them once and kept coming back. He never ordered chicken again. I knew the dish was a success,” she says.
That led Jay Fai to prepare her dishes with expensive seafood, raising the standard of her meals way above regular street food and charging higher prices. It was also the beginning of her signature dish crabmeat omelette, into which she puts almost 500 grams of crab and sells it for Bt1,000.
“I like to cook crab omelette but with that dish I wanted to make something different too. So I taught myself how to make Japanese omelette, rolling several layers of egg around a lot of crab. When I took my first bite, oh! It was so beautiful. I had done it. Now I had something special to sell,” she says.
That dish won her both praise and a lot of orders. She continued to build a whole new menu based on common dishes like tom yum, drunken noodles, and dry rice porridge but with extravagant ingredients. Today her best-selling dish is still the crabmeat omelette, while the most expensive is rad naa made with Mexican abalone that can go as high as Bt10,000 a pop. The cheapest items on the menu are guay tiew kua gai (wok-fried noodles with chicken) and pork rad naa, which start at Bt400.

Jay Fai and her daughter Yuwadee who now helps her to run the shop./Nation photo
 

Her non-stop creativity helped her save up the money to move into a permanent shophouse and has attracted people from around the world. Famous guests have included Martha Stewart and she appeared in the food travel programme like “Somebody Feed Phil” before earning a Michelin star in the first edition of Thailand’s “little red book”.
And she is known not just for her dishes but also for her appearance - she wears giant goggles when she cooks. 
“I started by borrowing my husband’s motorbike goggles after I had eye surgery. I used them to protect my eyes after the surgery and liked them so much that I continued. Someone has even contacted me to buy the copyright too,” she says with a smile.
The fame has changed her life and she asked her youngest daughter Yuwadee to leave her writing and translating job to help her manage the shop. Meanwhile, Jay Fai stays in the kitchen, doing exactly what she has done for the last 40 years. 
“I still cook with a charcoal brazier and am the only cook,” she says.
“I have faith in charcoal fires and iron woks. They taught me to be clever and brave. So for as long as I still have the strength, I will continue cooking.”
Asked whether she has any plans to pass her legacy to her daughter, Jay Fai says that it’s not easy.
“I’m old, but I always remind them that while they may be younger, I am stronger. It’s hard work handling the wok for hours every day and then you have to deal with your staff and your customers,” she says.
Her daughter who is now busy managing the queues at the restaurant agrees and knows that she can’t be the next Jay Fai though she is interested in continuing the family’s restaurant in her own way.
“I am a different generation and I can’t be her. If I do, I will find my own way. I want to be strong like her but at the same time, like anyone else at my age, there has to be a work-life balance too,” says Yuwadee, adding that to avoid disappointment, customers are advised to make a reservation is via email at [email protected]. They will get a confirmation email in return.