Most people in Dallas didn’t know much about Thai food 20 years ago when Nikky Phinyawatana and her husband, Tan Noisiri, opened their first Asian Mint in a strip center across from Medical City Dallas on Forest Lane.
Phinyawatana, then 27, had been a high school boarder at Hockaday, Dallas’ private girls’ prep school known for producing top students. She learned the ropes of entrepreneurship and marketing at Babson College outside of Boston.
Noisiri, 31, waited tables at a local Thai restaurant as he worked his way through two master’s degrees. In the process, he also learned how to cook and run the front of house.
The couple met by singing during a karaoke party at a Thai restaurant and landed their first lease on Forest Avenue by winning a coin toss.
The immigrants from Bangkok figured it was time to get down to business.
They married at a courthouse in September 2004 and formed their company the next month, laying plans for their small, dream-come-true food and dessert eatery.
Today, Dallas’ 46-year-old celebrity “Chef Nikky” and Noisiri, 50, own five area restaurants — the original, Oak Lawn Avenue, Inwood Village, Richardson and the newest in Addison, which opened in late 2022.
Their company, Asian Mint LLC, also includes cooking classes and private-label sauces, her annual guided tour — this year to Thailand and Southeast Asia — and her just-released memoir and cookbook.
Noisiri [pronounced noy-siri], who handles the books, is hopeful that total revenue will reach approximately $10 million this year. They expect to grow at a steady, self-financed pace to double the number of Asian Mints in six years.
That’s a lot of Asian fusion.
A typical customer pays $20 to $25 from a broad menu that includes five types of fried rice, along with four pad Thai, seven stir fry, six seafood and nine shirataki noodle dishes.
Noisiri’s tastebuds in the kitchen bring Phinyawatana’s culinary innovations to tabletop reality.
“I used to think that it was just good luck,” said Phinyawatana [pronounced pin-ya-wat-ta-na.] “But now I believe it was a path Tan and I created.”
A man in the kitchen
Privately, the couple acts in tandem as soulmate co-founders and sole owners. But most people — including her closest culinary friends — haven’t met Noisiri and have only a vague idea about what he actually does.
Opposites attract, she says.
Phinyawatana is a social media machine — creating endless ways to promote the Chef Nikky brand, enlist loyal “Mintee” followers and educate folks about the power of Asian food and travel.
She’s vivacious and makes lasting friends fast.
Noisiri, who has what Phinyawatana calls “a chef’s tongue,” is shy and his English is more challenged than hers. He’s more than happy to let his celebrity chef wife take front and center stage while he commands the kitchen at the flagship restaurant on Forest at North Central Expressway.
The only mention of Noisiri on Asian Mint’s website or on ChefNikky.com is a passing reference as her husband and the father of their two children.
It’s by design — his, not hers.
“People think that I do this intentionally, but noooo,” Phinyawatana said emphatically. “I’ve actually been ordered by him.”
“It’s me,” Noisiri confirmed. “I don’t want to be famous. I like to be private.”
He hates talking about himself and is self-conscious about his language skills.
“Why so much info about me?” he asked.
Paths converge
Nicole Phinyawatana, immediately nicknamed Nikky, was born here.
Her father, Vanchai Phinyawatana, was getting his business degree at Southern Methodist University when he met Jane Ford, a born-and-bred Texan who was an accountant in Plano. The family moved to Bangkok when Nikky was a baby.
Growing up, Nikky was happiest learning to cook in the traditional Thai outdoor kitchen with her nanny or picking and haggling for the freshest produce with her at the open-air market.
There was a Lone Star twist to Nikky’s Asian fusion. Her mom taught her how to bake chocolate chip cookies and Texas-style cakes in an indoor Western-style kitchen, where Ford says it was difficult to control the baking temperature in the Bangkok heat.
Ford was determined that Nikky learn enough English to converse with relatives in rural Leonard, about an hour northeast of Dallas, when they visited them in the summertime.
Ford sent Nikky to an international school in Bangkok hoping for bilingual progress.
It didn’t take.
As a last-ditch effort, she sent her 10th grader to boarding school at Hockaday in Dallas.
“It was so fun and so much more than learning English,” Phinyawatana said. “I lived in the boarding dorms for three years with all these friends from around the world. We didn’t even have cell phones. We just got email the last year I was there. I had a computer with those floppy discs.”
Being pushed out on her own by her mother taught Phinyawatana to be self-reliant, inventive and honed her leadership skills. “My mom is my role model.”
This time, English took. Phinyawatana was even teased when she used “y’all” in college up North.
His educational passport
Noisiri, who grew up in a middle-class Bangkok suburb, saw the United States as the land of opportunity. The 23-year-old chose Dallas for his entry point — even though he didn’t know anyone here — because of its international reputation, lower living costs and the University of Texas’ ESL program.
The University of Dallas was nearby and accepted his application for its MBA program, completed in 1998. “It was an easy move for me,” he said.
Next up was a master’s of science degree from Texas A&M-Commerce, completed in August 2003.
He’s not particularly studious — just pragmatic, he admits.
“I’m not like smart, smart, but to stay here longer, you have to be a student,” Noisiri said.
About that karaoke party
In 2001, Phinyawatana and Noisiri were working at different Thai restaurants in Addison.
“I wanted to work at a Thai restaurant to find my people, my community,” she said. “I’d just come back from college after five years, and all of my boarder friends had moved away. I wanted to find new peeps. I’m very social.”
Noisiri chuckled at the understatement.
One night, they both took the stage at a karaoke party, singing tunes in Thai.
Turns out, Noisiri cuts loose with a Thai audience and karaoke mic in hand.
He thought she was cute. She liked his voice.
Apichat Chakharawiroj, a fellow Thai transplant, says Noisiri is fun to pal around with. They got to know each other through their kids, who attend temple together at the Buddhist Center of Dallas.
“Tan always has creative ideas and thinks outside the box,” said Chakharawiroj, a systems integration engineer in Plano. “He is generous, helpful and even makes friends laugh with jokes. It is great to have him around.”
It came up tails
The couple’s first idea was to open a nighttime dessert, artisanal coffee and wine bar like the one she saw in Boston while going to Babson College.
“We were 20 years younger, so we thought it was super cool,” he said.
But then reality set in that late evening dinner wine, coffee and desserts weren’t going to pay the rent.
“Low profit margins and that just wasn’t how Dallas consumers ate,” she added.
So they pivoted.
“Most Thai restaurants back then were kind of dark, had carpet, smelled like grease,” she said. “We decided, ‘You know what? We should open a Thai restaurant and show people the type of food we grew up with.’”
They found a small space being vacated by a sushi restaurant, but another party wanted it, too. The realtor suggested they flip a quarter.
Phinyawatana and Noisiri thought what the heck. If they lost, they’d go back to Thailand.
The opponent called heads. It came up tails.
They spent their honeymoon planning the restaurant, painting, assembling tables and chairs, learning about gas lines, electricity and plumbing.
Her mother chopped bamboo from the side of a road. They spray-painted it white and nailed it to a wall as decor.
Initially, Ford tended bar. A year or so later, she took over as hostess to handle the bustling lunchtime and early dinner patrons from across the street at Medical City Dallas.
Phinyawatana took out zero-percent credit cards that had to be rolled over before the six-month promo period ended — which she’s pretty sure that she did. “I don’t like to think about those times,” she said.
Contagious enthusiasm
The photo library at The News has picture after picture of Phinyawatana participating in community give-back events.
She’s a “fan favorite” at the North Texas Food Bank’s annual Empty Bowls fundraiser where local chefs and restaurants provide “bowl-friendly fare” to remind the more fortunate that not everyone’s bowl is full, said Erica Yaeger, NTFB chief external affairs officer.
Paula Lambert, founder of Dallas-based Mozzarella Co. got to know Phinyawatana through Les Dames d’Escoffier, a nonprofit that supports women in the hospitality industry. Phinyawatana currently serves as its president.
“Last year Nikky came to Tuscany as my assistant for one of my culinary weeks,” said Lambert, considered Dallas’ queen of cheese and all things related. “My guests loved and connected with her.
“Nikky is positive, energetic and so much fun. And she’s a very good juggler.”
Lambert has never met Noisiri.
Nor has celebrity pal Stephan Pyles, a pioneer of Southwestern cuisine.
Phinyawatana and Pyles met at a Christmas party a few years ago and immediately bonded, said the principal of Stephan Pyles Concepts, a hospitality consultancy.
“Nikky is one of those rare chefs who not only cooks well but is endlessly creative,” said Pyles, who has 24 restaurants on his resume. “Her fervor for Thai cuisine, with all its trappings, is absolutely contagious.”
Saucing up business
Three years ago, the couple launched Chef Nikky’s cooking sauces and Drama Queen Chili Crunch, now sold in the restaurants, online and in Dallas-Fort Worth Central Markets.
“We came up with the sauces when we were doing many, many cooking sessions,” Phinyawatana said. “Our guests would say, ‘Hey, would you make the sauce for me, bottle it up and make [the recipes] simpler?’ We thought, ‘That’s kinda smart. We already use it.’ So we decided to figure out how to bottle our sauces commercially.”
Phinyawatana will lead about a dozen foodies on her latest travel and culinary adventure to Thailand-- this year adding Southeast Asia to the itinerary.
Her self-published memoir and cookbook, Thai Food and Travel with Chef Nikky: Easy Recipes to Feed Your Soul, was released on Amazon in April and edited by the late Dallas Morning News food critic, Dotty Griffith.
“This has definitely been a labor of love — 20 years in the making, five years in production,” Phinyawatana said. “To see it finally come to fruition is a dream-come-true moment.”
She wrote the book to document her life’s journey for her son and daughter, who she says feed her soul.
“And I want to inspire other people to follow their own passions and hearts,” she said. “It also has amazing recipes that the Dallas community loves and well as recipes that I grew up on.
“I want my kids to have all this forever in one place.”
No one knows more about the couple’s backstory than her mother.
Ford is most impressed by the quality of the business they’ve built and their devotion to family values.
The 68-year-old continues to be active in both regards. Ford attends staff meetings, uses her accounting background to help Noisiri with the books, acts as a secret shopper to make sure the restaurants are living up to quality standards, and is a devoted grandmother.
“Nikky is so passionate about everything that she does, and her focus changes,” Ford said. “At first it was the restaurant, then it was cooking demonstrations, people to cook, travel and now the cookbook. She has all those aspirations.”
The couple behind Asian Mint
Chef Nikky Phinyawatana
Title: Co-owner, Asian Mint
Age: 46
Born: Dallas
Grew up: Bangkok, Thailand
Education: Hockaday School, 1996, bachelor’s degree in business administration, Babson College, 2000; attended Culinary and Hospitality Institute at Dallas College.
Tan Noisiri
Title: Co-owner of Asian Mint
Age: 50
Born: suburban Bangkok
Education: MBA, University of Dallas, 1998; masters of science, Texas A&M-Commerce, 2003.
Couple has been married for 19 years and have a 15-year-old son, Knox, and 10-year-old daughter, Skye.
Asian Mint LLC
Founded: October 2004
Ownership: Nikky Phinyawatana and Tan Noisiri
Employees: 75
Annual revenue: Approximately $10 million projected for 2024 from five restaurants, cookbooks, private-label products, cooking class and a Chef Nikky guided tour of Thailand and Southeast Asia.
Locations: Forest Lane and North Central Expressway, Inwood Village, Oak Lawn, Richardson and Addison.
Sources: Nikky Phinyawatana and Tan Noisiri
