While many restaurants offer plant-based and meat-free substitutions, withhold or remove ingredients to accommodate customers, is the inner west wild child taking your typical Thai menu and completely flipping it on its head.
Opening its doors just over six months ago, Little Turtle has actually been two years in the making for 21-year-old owner and manager, Vinita Chumsri. “My parents both work in hospitality and own a couple of Thai restaurants around Sydney, so it’s in my blood.” With the support of her family, what started out as a side project has evolved into Chumsri’s most valued possession, a Thai restaurant that happens to be vegan.
My parents both work in the hospitality and they own a couple of Thai restaurants around Sydney, it’s in my blood.
Between running a restaurant and juggling her full-time university degree, internship as well as a diploma in fashion and business, as well as finding hours for family, friends and time to travel, Chumsri isn’t your average Millennial. With so many plates spinning at once, it quickly became inevitable that something had to give. “When I was at uni I was thinking about the restaurant, when I was at the restaurant I was thinking about uni and when I was fashion interning, I was thinking about uni and the restaurant. It was chaos, but without my incredible team, Little Turtle (and probably me) would have fallen apart,” says Chumsri.
“Food has been a huge weakness for me but it’s also become a huge strength,” says Chumsri, who went vegan six years ago to overcome a rather difficult and unhealthy relationship she had with food as a teenager. "This [going vegan] was a personal choice and one that helped me re-introduce fresh foods back into my diet and it was part of my bigger recovery from an eating disorder," Chumsri tells SBS. Going vegan inspired her to cook more at home, to make sauces, pastes and Thai dishes from scratch and gave her time to really experiment and master those traditional Thai dishes with veganism in mind and most importantly, without skimping on the flavour profile.
The team behind Little Turtle is like a family. Source: Little Turtle
The most important thing [to me] is to keep the flavours just right, especially with the curries and pastes.
After a couple of years of menu planning and recipe testing, Chumsri rolled the dice and opened Little Turtle. Her biggest challenge was striking the right chord with the menu - finding a way to celebrate her Thai heritage and family traditions, without relying on animal-based essentials like like shrimp paste, oyster and fish sauce that most have come to expect as laying the sharp, punchy, umami-rich foundations of the cuisine.
While some of the dishes celebrate northern Thailand (Chiang Mai), where her mother is from, others tap into the northeast (Udon Thani), where her father was born. The menu is a reflection of her family and her own travels and tastes from around the country and that still includes what southeast Asian cooking is notorious for – the sweet, sour, salty and spicy.
Tofu, tempeh and mushroom go a very long way on this menu - scrambled tofu (both firm and soft) play a huge role in the curry pastes, while a variety of mushrooms are prepared in a range of ways for texture and to play on the "meatier" aspects of dishes. “The most important thing [to me] is to keep the flavours just right, especially with the curries and pastes. I really want the flavours of a “real” curry to be right there and I love seeing people approach the menu without thinking of it as ‘vegan’,” Chumsri explains. And while she doesn't divulge too much about her recipes, her secret weapon is a vegan oyster sauce, which she uses religiously to bring out that umami hit.
Along with crisp salads and pad noodle-fries, it's their mushroom toasts with Sriracha mayo and pineapple blue fried rice (which gets its colour from the butterfly pea flower) that are high on rotation. But leading the charge are their curries and sticky sesame battered cauliflower "buffalo wings" that are raising some serious eyebrows and the secret really is in their sauce.
Their take on hor mok, a typical red fish curry steamed in banana leaf, is made with pearl mushroom and tofu served in a hollowed-out coconut with the fresh juice served beside it as a chaser. And don’t let the lack of animal-based punch fool you, their Chiang Mai khao soi curry of tempeh and yellow noodles, as well as their Penang of caramelised eggplant, taste like the real deal.
While Little Turtle is already tinkering with a vegan dessert menu, spanning black sesame cakes, dipping custards, mango sticky rice and glutinous dumplings in a ginger broth, Chumsri has even bigger plans for the menu in 2019 and we’re hoping some things simply stick, like those sesame “wings”.
10 Stanmore Rd, Enmore NSW 2042
Open 7 days, 11 am – 10 pm
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