Thaiglish, a pop-up restaurant that has played peek-a-boo throughout the Hudson Valley since 2018 has settled into a monthly residency at Eliza, itself a newcomer to Midtown Kingston's restaurant row.

The brainchild of Thai-born Pruitt Kerdchoochuen, the project seeks to introduce diners to the cuisine she inherited from her family, but with the contemporary sensibility she developed through apprenticeship and training in some of the best restaurants in our region.

Pruitt is heating rice in a pan on one of the kitchen's stoves when we meet. It's a traditional part of Thai cuisine, she explains, but she's using it for ice cream, which is not traditional but works well, she says, with the rice's “warm, toasty flavor profile.” A pork curry, a mushroom noodle dish and a corn salad are also on the menu this week — the third in its regular one-Thursday-a-month series.

The child of upper middle-class parents, Pruitt grew up dividing her time between Bangkok (and its food courts) and the Muak Lek district of Saraburi, a mountain province in Thailand's northeast, where the family ran an organic dairy farm and restaurant and which she compares to the Catskills, a rural area dotted with urban dwellers' second homes.

A Connecticut boarding school was followed by a stint at Yale, where she studied history, though with a foodie twist. “The thing that really fascinated me is the history of food and how it draws together a bunch of threads, different subjects all together, a product that is tangible and is something that most people can connect to.”

“Like a Thai green curry,” she continues, “there's all the civilizations that have influenced the area that is modern Thailand. We wouldn't have chilis if it wasn't for the colonization of the Americas, because chilies are native to the Americas and brought to Asians by Portuguese traders.”

Yale was followed by an associate's degree from the Culinary Institute of America and time in the kitchen of the prestigious Blue Hill at Stone Barns and at Kitty's in Hudson, where she was chef de cuisine, as well as at nutrition access non-profit Wholesome Wave.

Continuing inspiration comes from New York excursions to “New restaurants, especially restaurants that are by folks who are kind of like me, Third Culture kids, folks who have immigrant parents who grew up in the U.S. and pulled together different threads of their heritage and their history, and put it on a plate. And I think that's a really, like, exciting thing.”

Local sources play a role for staples, like Albany's football field-sized Farmer's India Market and Woodstock's Harana Market.

Pruitt expressed hope that the wide popularity of Thai food in the U.S. can avoid the lowest common denominator effect that often follows the absorption of new cuisines. (Taco Bell, anyone?)

“The range of Thai food is really wide,” Pruitt says. “If you look at the map of Thailand, there's different regions with different climates and different eating habits. So even just regionally, Thai food has a lot of variety. My mom's from the Central Plains, in a suburb of Bangkok, where she grew up on the river. And the food that she grew up eating is different from the food that of my dad's family, from the Northeast. For my mom the staples are what people might be more familiar with as Thai food today — coconut milk-based curries with flavors that are mildly spicy but more kind of sweet, because coconut and palm sugar are common to that region. Whereas for my dad's family their food tends to be more assertive, more spicy, or herbaceous, a lot more loud in that way.”

Pruitt credits executive chef Chris Bradley and the rest of Eliza's staff for Thaiglish's successful launch — as many as 120 dinners served per night. “I have a whole amazing team,” she says. “I think one of the things that I learned very quickly about doing pop ups, it's not just, you know, about one singular person doing it. It's my project but I always need support from everyone else in order to pull it off. There's no Thaiglish pop-ups without the rest of the team.”

Eliza is located at 582 Broadway; click here for more.