Eat Your Way Around the World: Chef Su Hill, Chiang Mai, Thailand

It was founded in the year 1296 as the new capital city of Lan Na, an Indianized state that is now part of present-day Thailand. It is known for its 117 Buddhist temples and as a site where floating lanterns are released each year during Yi Peng, to honor the Goddess of Water. It’s home to multiple universities and one of Thailand’s two museums of contemporary art.

It’s Chiang Mai, the largest city in northern Thailand.

It’s where Chef Su Hill, owner of Bistro Saffron in Cape Girardeau and Chiang Mai in St. Louis, was born and raised. It’s also where she first discovered her love for cooking.

Hill’s mother is her inspiration in the kitchen; her mother was a noblewoman trained in the Thai palace as a member of the royal household and kitchen. When Hill’s mother moved to Chiang Mai as a young adult and new bride, she became the head cook for a missionary doctor’s family. Hill’s mother taught her to cook using the fresh herbs and vegetables from their garden; many of the recipes Hill uses at her restaurants are her mother’s, and she has copies of them written in Thai, in her mom’s handwriting.

“Every morning, I think about Chiang Mai food, and I start to remember my mom being there, cooking with what very little we had,” Hill says. “My dad would make a garden, and my mom would just bring it in and make something from that.”

In 1976, Hill moved to the U.S. to attend college at Memphis State, now the University of Memphis in Tennessee. She brought one suitcase with her. After graduation, she attended Holiday Inn University, where she learned about the hotel and culinary industries. She worked at Holiday Inn’s flagship hotel at Navy Pier in Chicago for three years before moving to Cape Girardeau to help grow the Holiday Inn hotel there. While working at the hotel in Cape, she bought her brother’s Thai restaurant and went into business for herself. Since, she has opened numerous restaurants, in Cape Girardeau and St. Louis.

“Every day, people come in and enjoy the food,” Hill says. “If you are true to yourself, you know what you know, you have your passion, you can keep on going.”

Hill lives out her mission of sharing the food of her childhood daily — with new additions to the menu that rolled out this spring, Bistro Saffron in Cape Girardeau now offers the dishes served at Chiang Mai in St. Louis, including larb khua, sautéed spicy minced beef with vegetables; sai oua, a special spicy grilled pork sausage with fresh herbs and peanuts; sakoo sai moo, tapioca dumplings with minced pork and peanut filling, and more.

It is all an homage to the place of her birth, an homage to her mother.

“I think we need to preserve it,” Hill says. “We need to introduce to the world that really, really authentic northern Thai food.”