Our Featured Restaurant Owner is Andie, founder of Thai Kitchen – offering four locations across the St. Louis region.
ST LOUIS, MO (StLouisRestaurantReview) Finding interesting restaurant owners is not a difficult job. Most are creative, friendly, and exciting people to be around. But sometimes the most attractive and worldly are hidden in the kitchen, not looking for fame or fortune, but more concerned about making great food that people love, which helps support staff and family members.
But what defines “interesting?” Having unique ideas about decorating their restaurant or hiring people to cook the food they sell to the public when they can’t cook it themselves? Is that interesting? Not to us!
Interesting to me might be a restaurant owner that moved to America knowing very little English with three kids and has opened 15 restaurants since 1997. Her first restaurant was located in Bangkok, which she operated for five years before moving to the USA.
The founder moved to the USA in 1995 with the encouragement and support of her sizeable Thai family in America. She opened her first US-based restaurant in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 1997. She humbly recognizes that without the family’s support, she could not have accomplished her overwhelming achievements.
Since opening her first restaurant in the US, she has opened multiple restaurants that have been sold. Today, she is operating three restaurants known as “Thai Kitchen,” located in the following communities:
- Florissant – Started April 2018 (Owned by Andies’ brother and sister-in-law)
- O’Fallon – Started January 2013
- St. Charles – Started January 2019
- Wentzville – Started November 2020
This hidden gem is Sasimonthon Ongartsutthikul, but she goes by “Andie.” Andie loved to cook from an early age as her parents, with seven kids, divided the household chores, and she was chosen to cook. She loved it then and still loves it today. We visit her at a different restaurant each day, and she is always in the kitchen, cooking, teaching, or monitoring the cooking of her Thai family recipes, which are made from ingredients from Thailand. The results are a dedicated customer base that loves her food and is not afraid to praise her Thai cuisines with highly rated online reviews on all platforms.
Most of the staff are family members, including Andie’s mother, Kularb, a.k.a. Rose, who is 74 years old, standing by her family working each day to make their family recipe Thai dishes for their customers.
Andie visits Thailand each year and frequently finds new ideas to add to her menu.
Andie has the loving support of her three daughters, Pam, Nickie, and Katie.
We have not spent as much time with Andie as we want, but that will come in time. She is creative, dedicated, and not afraid to work. Disciplined, creative, and the desire to satisfy her customers will ensure that her restaurants attract award-winning online customer reviews, which in todays’ technological-driven society, is the secret to success in business.
CLICK to ORDER ONLINE from one of the Thai Kitchen locations.
