Chef Pam transformed a 120-year-old family business into a Michelin-starred restaurant, showing how heritage can fuel innovation and competitive edge...
What do you do with a 120-year-old family business when success is fading, but you cherish the name and history?
When Pam Pichaya Soontornyanakij first climbed the narrow stairs of her family’s old medicine manufacturing business building in Bangkok’s Chinatown, she wasn’t thinking about real estate returns. She was looking for her place in a five-generation story.
“Walking up each floor, it felt like going back in time,” she recalls. “You could see the history – it felt personal and strange, but in a good way. Standing where my ancestors once stood, I thought, if I’m ever going to have the restaurant of my dreams, it has to be here.”
That instinct would go on to shape Potong, which roughly translates as ‘simple’, her Michelin-starred restaurant and one of Asia’s most distinctive dining experiences.
Pam’s family came to Bangkok from Kinmen Island off China’s Fujian coast. Her great‑great‑grandfather built a traditional Chinese medicine business in Chinatown under the name Bao Kun Yi Mu Yao, with the family living upstairs. For three generations, the business flourished under the name Potong. Then, customer preferences shifted. Modern pills replaced liquid medicine, and the business began to decline.
Today, the medicine business is no longer thriving, but it continues to serve as a repository of identity, memory, and meaning. Rather than thinking of family business legacy in terms of product continuity and profit, Pam chose to reframe its purpose. “It’s not about money,” she says. “It’s not easy to have a business for over 120 years. To discontinue that just because it’s not making money – I think it’s a waste.”
Yet, a business family needs a successful business to last. The question then becomes what role legacy should play in the business going forward. Pam was faced with a challenge: find a way to combine her passion for being a world-class chef with reviving the family business legacy that meant so much to her and her family.
“This building is very personal to me. I want guests to feel like they’re coming into my space and my home.”
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.
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.”
I want to be remembered as a strong woman who creates legacy through her heritage.
In Chinese medicine, the formulas to produce products were often a closely kept family secret, which needed protecting. The same is true in the restaurant world, where secrecy is often part of the craft. Pam takes a different approach. “If you’re secretive, you become stressed thinking about people copying you,” she says. “Great chefs don’t want to copy. They want to create.”
Instead of protecting her knowledge, she focuses on evolving it. Traditional techniques drawn from her heritage are not treated as fixed formulas but as starting points for experimentation and refinement.
This approach extends beyond the kitchen. By being open about processes and ideas, Pam creates an environment where her team can understand how things are done, rather than simply follow instructions. Standards are built through shared understanding rather than protected knowledge.
Openness replaces control with clarity, allowing her to scale progressive Thai-Chinese cuisine as a category. Her influence travels far beyond her own restaurant. For Pam, transparency is not just a value. It is a way of accelerating her impact by inspiring others.
While Asian business legacies often feature male heroes, as men would typically lead the business, Pam’s story highlights the essential impact of strong women on entrepreneurial trajectories.
She was influenced by her mother, whose cooking she associated with comfort and love, and who disciplined her to aim for excellence. It was the comfort zone of the kitchen knives and cutting boards that sparked a creative and entrepreneurial fire in the generation, and the family legacy continues by adding a new layer of success.
“I want to be remembered as a strong woman who creates legacy through her heritage,” she adds. “And as a humble chef who revived this building and made it a landmark in Thailand.”
Although Potong already attracts global attention and has helped Pam earn the title of world’s best female chef, she remains humble and focused on the journey ahead. “We still have a lot of things to work on. I think we are still young as a restaurant, only five years old. We plan to evolve even more in the future.”
To Pam, a family business legacy is not a one-way street. When the next generations perceive themselves as constrained by history and legacy, it can feel like living in a cage where young people cannot thrive.
But when you redefine your family business legacy as something that continues to evolve, it can become a source of inspiration, a unique competitive advantage, and a driver for impact. “You can follow your passion, but also connect with the heritage.” Pam’s success shows that legacies are not passed down; they are taken up.
Young family business leaders, who sometimes feel torn between what they perceive as an old-fashioned business and their different aspirations for innovation, can draw many lessons from Pam’s story. In taking on ownership of her family legacy, Pam also shaped it so it can continue to thrive. “Use your imagination, work hard, and really prove that it can be done.”
Asked if she wants her legacy to continue in the next generation of her family, the answer is a resounding yes.
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