Chef Jimmy Ophorst of PRU in Phuket sheds light on the ethos of farm-to-table cooking
Power to ingredients
Earning a Michelin star is one thing, but achieving Green Star on top of that is a feat in a class of its own. Yet, chef Jimmy Ophorst has done just that with Pru. To make things even more impressive, the restaurant is the sole establishment in its city of Phuket to have obtained the Michelin accolade. As Executive Chef at Pru, Ophorst has made a name for himself (and the restaurant) not only in Thailand’s fine dining landscape, but also in the world of sustainable cooking.
Located by the luxe Trisara beach resort, Pru serves as a standard for honest cooking with community at the core of its values. Ophorst and his team champion local ingredients day in and day out, even offering the ovo-lacto plant-based Gaia menu that puts lesser-known Thai ingredients in the spotlight. Ahead of his appearance in Kuala Lumpur for the upcoming KITA Food Festival 2024, we caught up with the decorated chef for some of his wisdom on cooking and more.
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Tell us about the ethos behind Pru and your cooking.
At Pru, we showcase the best produce available in Thailand with classical cooking techniques. We want to show off all the beauty this country has to offer and educate our guests by spotlighting the rare and unknown ingredients that have perhaps been forgotten or undiscovered. We take pride in creating a unique dining experience for our guests on the island of Phuket, where we have created a very different and unique experience.
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Take us through the story behind Pru’s name.
When we had the idea of opening a new restaurant back in 2016, we wanted it to be special and different. We had the opportunity to create a farm together with the opening of our new restaurant and the farm is located within a village called “Pru Jampa”. So, we decided to name the restaurant Pru which also means “where water and land come together and new life will start” in the Southern Thai dialect. This directly reflected what we wanted Pru to showcase, using local produce from the land and the sea to create a new farm-to-table experience.
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What made you want to work in Phuket?
I first came to Thailand in 2012 and after one night in Bangkok, I immediately flew down to Phuket to start working at my consultancy job. Since then, I fell in love with Phuket island and I was able to join the team at Trisara hotel in 2014. They offered me the opportunity to open a new restaurant in 2016, which is what became Pru.
When we decided to open a new restaurant, we knew that we wanted to be different and provide something unique and something that we believed in from the get go. A lot of people didn’t understand why we were trying to do something like this in Phuket, especially when the reason why people travel to the island is for the beach and not for unique or fine dining experiences. But with a lot of hard work and our belief that we would succeed in changing people’s perceptions one day, we were able to receive our first Michelin star in 2018. Just one and a half years after we opened Pru. To this day, we are still the only restaurant in Phuket with such an award.
We prefer to take on challenges and work hard to achieve our goals. Promoting Phuket as a dining destination, while making sure that the local communities also profit from what we do and gaining more exposure for the island is exactly what we want to do. We aim to give back and uplift the people that have enabled us to succeed.
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What’s something people might not know about Phuket’s produce?
Phuket and especially the Southern Thailand is incredibly biodiverse and has so much produce that is very unfamiliar to a lot of people and the seasons can change every two weeks and month. The ocean is just next door which allows me to bring live seafood every single day, something that you are not able to get in many other countries.
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What is the process of developing a recipe like at Pru? Do ingredients or the recipe come first?
Ask my head chef! But at Pru, we always look for new and unknown ingredients across Thailand. These are the ingredients that we incorporate into our dishes, in which the base is always the unknown and served with a sauce or accompaniment. Starting with those two as the foundation of a new dish, developing a dish can take up to six months. However, it can also take us years to perfect the dish. Our Durian dish is a perfect example of that.
We travel across the country to find new ingredients and local communities that we can work with to create something unique that has not been done before. That is the motto at Pru. If you’ve seen it somewhere else or at a different restaurant then we try to stay away from it. This pushes us further and it tests our own limits, resulting in very unique creations on the plate.
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In your opinion, what makes cooking “good” and “sustainable”?
You have to believe in what you do. Don’t do things just because others are doing it. Cook with your heart and think with your head. We have a golden opportunity at Pru to be more sustainable because of the farm that we created, which helps us a lot on a daily basis. But apart from that, we always try to think about new things that we can do to be more sustainable. However, again, sustainability has to be a mind set and not a marketing tool.
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Describe the power and influence chefs have to shape culture and people’s eating habits.
I think, nowadays, a lot of people are influenced by social media. I am not a big fan of it. While it can be a good influence, it can also have a negative one because it can highlight and establish wrong habits among guests sometimes. Not many people see said negative influence, but this is something that happens everywhere.
It sometimes creates unrealistic expectations, and can reinforce beliefs like how fake meats, which are full of chemicals, are better for you compared to a piece of chicken that has been sourced locally and ethically for example. I have social media myself because it’s good for the business and it inspires others, but if it wasn’t for that, I would probably not use it.
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What are your hopes for Southeast Asia’s culinary landscape in the next couple of years?
To be honest, I don’t really have hopes, but more so goals. We set them and have to ensure that we push ourselves to deliver. It’s something that we’ve always done since the restaurant opened. I also started to set such goals personally when I decided to move to the other side of the world at the age of 22, to become a better person, a better chef, and to create something unique.
For Phuket, I have set the goal to have people from around the globe to travel to the island to eat at Pru. This will stimulate all aspects of business and daily life on the island, including the local community and the people that we work with to make it happen for us. They give us the ability to operate and shine at the level that we do.
Catch chefs Jimmy Ophorst and Masashi Horiuchi in action during their KITA Food Festival collaboration dinner at Potager on 4 and 5 September 2024. Find more information here.
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