'I opened my first noodle shop at 14': Saiphin Moore of Rosa’s Thai Cafe on her inspiration and drive

The cook and restaurateur Saiphin Moore was born in Thailand to Laotian parents, before moving to Hong Kong as an 18-year-old to work as a nanny. After moving to the UK and starting a takeaway food business, she and her husband Alex co-founded their first Thai restaurant, Rosa’s Thai Cafe, near Brick Lane. Since 2006, this has since expanded to a group of nine across London, as well as the more recent Lao Cafe. Earlier this year, she published her second cookbook, ‘Rosa’s Thai Café: the Vegetarian Cookbook,’ much of which was inspired by the food she had as a child.

Growing up in the mountainous Khao Who district of northeastern Thailand, Saiphin Moore and her family cooked 70 per cent Laotian and 30 per cent Thai food. The former portion was the cuisine familiar with her Laotian grandparents. The remaining 30 per cent, meanwhile, was particularly special to her.

“Thai food for us was something that my mum and aunt and I had to make specifically for the monks in the temples as they would only eat Thai food. For them I would always cook Penang beef curry because I could always find the ingredients nearby - so the coconuts came from the trees near my parents’ house and to make the curry paste we would dig the lemongrass and galangal growing there. We would also make them the vegetarian aubergine dip with steamed vegetables, which the monks would eat with steamed rice. So because of that Thai food is very special for me,” says restaurateur Moore, reminiscing about her early years.

At home, where it was “so green, very mountainous, and very, very beautiful,” Moore and her family lived on, and ran, a vegetable farm, living almost entirely off the land. Here they harvested rice, after which they’d use the same fields to grow green and red bell peppers, carrots, Chinese cabbage, and other leafy vegetables. During preparation for the Full Moon festival, for example, they would grow fresh green garlic as an offer to God: “every harvest we’d use the space in some way. We never let the land get empty,” describes Moore, who says she still adores vegetables and, in particular, bamboo which she used to go hunting for.

“Sometimes we’d only eat vegetables! But also we rarely bought any food - if we wanted chicken, we had our own. If we wanted vegetables we had them. All the ingredients we needed were there by the side of the house, and were so fresh. If you really wanted to eat a big animal, we had to go and buy it. And because where I come from is very high up, we had to drive 30km to pick some up. So we didn’t do it very often.”

Cooking was done “in a very old, traditional Thai-style kitchen” around one “very blackened pan” on the floor “using charcoal that we’d made ourselves from tamarind wood.” Moore helped her mother and aunt, each of whom specialised in certain things.

“Mum always made amazing chilli dipping sauces to eat with sticky rice and steamed fresh vegetables,” says Moore. “Even today my Instagram feed is full of these kind of things, because just that’s the way we eat. Fresh vegetables and that’s it - it’s really simple. I loved it.”

Two types of chilli dipping featured on her mother’s menus: one made with roasted dried chilli, “smashed with garlic, coriander, tomato and salt - and that’s it.” The other was made with fresh bird’s eye chilli also smashed with garlic, as well as fish sauce, tomato and garlic leaves.

Her aunt, meanwhile, was “so good at making Thai food,” and in particular green curries and a “fantastic dish involving lots of vegetable stock, fermented yellow beans and soy sauce - a speciality during the month of October.

Rice, however, was Moore’s responsibility, and from the age of seven she would get up early every day to prepare some for the whole family, “and then we’d all eat together in the kitchen.”

It was thanks to her parents that Moore became obsessed with noodles - a treat bought whenever they made extra money:

“I would go and watch how the sellers made them and I just loved them so much. I still love noodles. Noodles are everything to me,” she admits.

Entranced by how the sellers prepared her new favourite food, Moore would look at their cooking techniques, later offering to carry water to fill their pans. Eventually they began paying her 2-3 Thai Baht, and at 14 years old, Moore declared to her parents that she was going to start a noodle shop.

“I started making money from selling vegetables for 700 Baht in the big town nearby then saving it up to buy all of my ingredients and equipment there for the noodles. Every morning I would get up at about 4am, go down to the town on my motorbike, and bring all the food back up on it to my parents’ house.”

Each day until she was 18 years old and moved to Hong Kong, Moore would set up shop under her bedroom window, and recreate what she’d seen in the town:

“I’d seen what they’d put in the mixture, and I just copied them. I used the same wood for cooking, and I cooked the peppers and the garlic and the pork or chicken bones, and all sorts of things.

Today she says she always reverts back to these ideas in her own cooking:

“I use all that experience I had from a really young age to create all this food today - it’s all so natural to me because of that. Pretty much everything that I cook has a childhood memory of some sort. In the new book there are so many things I learnt that way. Even when I went to Hong Kong, I’d go to the supermarket to buy the vegetables to remember home - but then I’d go back home and help my parents on the vegetable farm. It was fantastic.”

‘Rosa’s Thai Café: the Vegetarian Cookbook’ by Saiphin Moore is out now (Mitchell Beazley, £20)