Only 40 Seats: Chef Pam Sydney Restaurant Arrives in 2027

The Chef Pam Sydney restaurant heading for Crown in 2027 comes with one number that shapes everything else about it: about 40 seats. Broadsheet puts the count nearer 35. Either way it is a tiny room, and it belongs to a cook whose Bangkok restaurant, Potong, was ranked 13th on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list in 2025 and who took the World's Best Female Chef title the same year.

Pichaya Soontornyanakij, known to almost everyone as Chef Pam, is opening two venues here, not one. Sydney gets Sek, a degustation-only fine diner on Level 3 of Crown, in the space now occupied by 88 Noodle. Perth gets Khao San Sek at Crown Perth, a casual à la carte room built around rice. Both are pencilled in for 2027, with Sydney flagged for around the middle of the year.

What makes this worth paying attention to is where she didn't go. This is her first fine-dining restaurant outside Thailand, and it isn't landing in Paris, London or New York. Part of the reason is family. Her grandmother was born and raised in New South Wales, one branch of a Thai-Chinese line that reached Bangkok's Chinatown from Fujian in the 1880s.

Who Is Chef Pam, and Why 13th Matters

She's 36. A communication arts degree from Chulalongkorn University in 2010, then the Culinary Institute of America, then time at Jean-Georges in New York. Her first fine diner, The Table, opened in Bangkok in 2015. Potong followed in 2021, inside her family's restored 120-year-old shophouse — the building that once housed their Chinese herbal medicine business. It picked up a Michelin star almost straight away.

The climb is the bit that impresses people in the trade. Hospitality Magazine reports Potong sat at No. 57 on the extended list in 2024 before vaulting to 13th in 2025. It holds the same position on Asia's 50 Best. Restaurants almost never move that far in a single year, and a jump like that turns a chef into a name that fills a diary years ahead of opening.

What the Chef Pam Sydney Restaurant Will Serve

Sek is a set menu, no à la carte. It opens with nam prik — chilli paste — and raw vegetables, which is roughly how a Thai meal begins at home rather than how a Western tasting menu begins. It closes the same way, with dishes shared over rice instead of a plated finale. Petit fours lean on coconut, pandan and tapioca. There's an open kitchen, tableside work, wine pairings and a dessert trolley.

Opening my first Australian restaurants is incredibly meaningful. My current venues are about respecting the foundations of Thai cuisine and expressing them in a modern and personal way.

Underpinning both venues is what she calls the five sacred ingredients: rice, coconut, chilli, palm sugar and fish sauce. It's a tight brief, and a useful one — it rules out the safe pan-Asian drift that has swallowed plenty of ambitious Thai menus in this country.

Perth Gets the Loose One

Khao San Sek is the more approachable half of the deal, and arguably the more interesting test. Casual, ordered off a menu, priced for a normal night out rather than an anniversary.

Marron, Tassie Trout and Fremantle Octopus

The kitchen is leaning hard on Australian seafood — marron, Tasmanian trout, Fremantle octopus, blue swimmer crab — cooked to Thai flavour profiles. That's a genuinely different proposition from importing a Bangkok menu and hoping the produce holds up. Blue swimmer crab in particular is a natural fit for southern Thai cooking, and WA has plenty of it.

Why Perth Wasn't the Odd Choice

Perth already knows this food. David Thompson, the Australian chef who ran Darley Street Thai and Sailors Thai in Sydney before taking Nahm to London and Bangkok, has run Long Chim in Perth's State Buildings for years. Crown Perth chief executive Brian Pereira pointed to the city's Asian connections and its appetite for Thai flavours when the deal was announced. He isn't wrong — the market is proven.

Crown Is Buying Names, Not Just Kitchens

Crown Sydney has stacked its dining floors with borrowed reputations since it opened: Oncore by Clare Smyth, Nobu, a'Mare by Alessandro Pavoni, Woodcut by Ross and Sunny Lusted. Sek continues that pattern, and it costs 88 Noodle its Level 3 home. Crown Sydney chief executive Ken Janssen described the deal as a new chapter for Australian dining. The commercial logic is simpler than that: a 40-seat room with a globally ranked name attached books out on announcement alone.

What to Watch Before the Doors Open

No prices have been released for either venue, but a degustation-only room of that size in Sydney will sit comfortably into three figures a head in Australian dollars, and 40 covers a service means the booking window will be brutal. Watch for two things: the date 88 Noodle actually closes, which will tell you how close mid-2027 really is, and whether Crown opens a waitlist early. If you want the food without the fight, Perth is the easier door.