Potong: Rethinking legacy in a family business

Using legacy to create a competitive advantage

Her next step was deciding how to honor the legacy in practice, starting with the physical space that housed the family’s medicine business. The building sits on a narrow street in Bangkok’s messy Chinatown, far from the locations her grandfather considered attractive for a fine dining restaurant.

However, Pam believed that diners would travel for a distinctive experience, and that the heritage of the family business could become part of what guests were buying. From the outset, she was clear that the building’s past could not just sit in the background; it had to shape the guest experience. “This building is very personal to me. I want guests to feel like they’re coming into my space and my home,” she says. “If they just eat and go, they won’t appreciate the stories behind each dish and behind the building.”

She and her family decided to keep as much as possible of the original structure and to be honest about what was new. Old jars, containers, and letters from the pharmaceutical business are on display, a reminder of the commercial life that once defined the same space.

The unique family heritage becomes a tool to provide value, turning it into a competitive advantage. Something so personal and unique is hard to copy.

From legacy-based competitive advantage to new category creation

Pam’s view of heritage did not stop at the building but also shaped what came out of the kitchen. Trained in classical French cuisine, she returned to Thailand eager to define something of her own. “I wanted a cuisine that represents my heritage, Thai-Chinese, and combine it with the experiences I’ve had around the world,” she explains.

Finding the right label was challenging, but she eventually settled on “progressive Thai-Chinese,” a term that signals both continuity and change. It acknowledges the roots of the cuisine, while making clear that it is not a reproduction of the past.

Naming it changed how the business could be understood. In many heritage businesses, what makes the business distinctive is understood internally, but often not clearly expressed. Without a clear definition, it becomes difficult to differentiate, communicate value, or scale. By defining her cuisine in her own terms, what started as a unique competitive advantage of one restaurant evolved into a broader platform that came to define Thai fine dining.

Together with her husband and partner, she has begun acquiring other buildings in the neighborhood. They’ve since opened a second restaurant and a small bar nearby. Her ambition is to “create a small empire” around the area, not by replicating Potong elsewhere, but by building around it. In defining an entire new category of dining, she is setting the standards for other chefs keen to elevate their own version of Thai-Chinese cuisine.

“This restaurant, Potong, I never think of leaving at all because it belongs to my family,” she says.

Her uniquely personal, heritage-inspired philosophy carries through to execution. Ingredients and techniques from the pharmacy appear in broths, fermentations, and flavor profiles, but they are integrated with restraint. “I really believe in the ancient ways of doing things,” she says. “But to understand that and move forward and evolve, I think it means a lot more.”