Pok Pok

A deep dive into the regional Thai cooking that most Western cookbooks never touch, written by an American chef who spent decades traveling through Thailand before opening the acclaimed Pok Pok restaurant in Portland, Oregon. Andy Ricker brings an obsessive attention to detail and an outsider’s perspective that makes unfamiliar dishes feel vivid and real.

Why Start Here

This is not a beginner’s cookbook, but it is the book to graduate to once you have the basics down. Ricker covers dishes from northern Thailand, the Isan region, and Bangkok street food traditions that rarely appear in Western cookbooks. The recipes are precise and involved, often requiring specialty ingredients and multi-step preparations, but the results are extraordinary.

What makes Pok Pok valuable is the storytelling. Ricker explains where each dish comes from, how he encountered it, and why it matters in the broader context of Thai food culture. You come away understanding not just how to cook these dishes but why they taste the way they do. The photography by Austin Bush captures the street stalls and roadside restaurants where these recipes were born.

What to Expect

A substantial cookbook at 304 pages with more than fifty recipes. Many require ingredients you will need to source from Asian grocery stores, and some techniques take practice. This is a book for cooks who want to go beyond the familiar green curry and pad thai into the deeper waters of Thai cuisine. It pairs well with a more accessible starter book for building foundational skills first.