Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Asian Studies

Reader 1

Samuel H. Yamashita

Reader 2

Angelina Chin

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Abstract

This thesis examines Potong Restaurant, a fine-dining establishment opened in 2021 in Yaowarat, Bangkok's historic Chinatown, as a focused case study in how Thai-Chinese Hokkien diasporic heritage is constructed, packaged, and received in a contemporary commercial context. Situated within a century-old herbal pharmacy and recognized by a Michelin Star, a World’s 50 Best ranking of No. 13, and the World’s Best Female Chef 2025 title for its owner, Pichaya “Pam” Soontornyanakij, Potong is an unusually visible and well-documented instance of diasporic heritage being translated into global fine-dining prestige, which makes it a productive, if exceptional, case for examining the tensions that translation produces. The study addresses three questions: how do Potong’s culinary practices construct a version of Sino-Thai diasporic identity, how is that construction received across different audiences, and what does analyzing this one restaurant reveal about the relationship between diasporic heritage, class, and commercial visibility more broadly.

Using Jaruwan Teanmahasatid and Thomas Bruce’s Integration–Resistance–Acceptance (IRA) framework and Liselotte Hedegaard’s foodscape theory, and working from close analysis of the restaurant’s menu, architecture, digital self-presentation, and a first-person tasting-menu experience, I trace how Potong simultaneously asserts a specific Hokkien diasporic heritage, embeds it in the global fine-dining vocabulary, and seeks acceptance from Thai and international elite audiences. In examining its reception—through the Michelin Guide, the World's 50 Best, YouTube reviews, Google Reviews, and TripAdvisor—I find that the three registers operate asymmetrically: the Acceptance register achieves broad legibility across audiences, while the Resistance register is received in full depth only by those who share the cultural grammar it invokes. Original fieldwork in Yaowarat in December 2025 and January 2026, including observation of the contemporary food scene, a visit to the Yaowarat Chinatown Heritage Center, and an informal interview with local restaurant staff, further complicates the relationship between the restaurant’s global visibility and its local embeddedness—a gap that the IRA framework, I argue, is not designed to register.

What this case study suggests, rather than conclusively demonstrates, is that Potong operates simultaneously as an act of cultural recovery and as a premium heritage tourism product. Both the restaurant and the Heritage Center produce selective narratives of Thai-Chinese history that foreground achievement and resilience while muting the coercive dimensions of assimilation—narratives oriented, in both cases, toward tourist and upper-class consumption. The tension between cultural reclamation and commercial curation is not unique to Potong, but this study documents it with unusual specificity in one place, at one moment, and through one family’s story. How far its findings extend to other diasporic culinary institutions remains an open question.

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This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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