Chef Angus An of Maenam
Beyond authentic.
Hot, salty, sour, sweet, and bitter—classic Thai cuisine is built upon the harmonious balance of these five tastes, created by layering ingredients over a progression of dishes. Chef Angus An deftly walks this flavour tightrope with precision and ease at Maenam, his modern Thai restaurant in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood. Grounded by a year and a half spent in the Michelin-starred kitchen of David Thompson’s Nahm, his culinary approach transcends the rigidity of traditional dishes, embracing the bounty of local Canadian ingredients and fluidly interpreting them in a progressive Thai context.
Food has always played a significant role in 36-year-old An’s life. “Growing up in Taiwan, my family was always big into food. We had an Asian kitchen when I was a kid, and my mom taught me how to fry an egg on a wok burner when I was in Grade 1 and I learned how to make fried rice in Grade 2. It was fun even though I could barely see over the top of the wok.”
After An immigrated to Canada with his family at the age of 10, food became a marker for defining his cultural identity. “In Maple Ridge, I was the only Asian kid in my class, and it was very difficult to make the adjustment,” he says. Lunchtime was particularly torturous; classmates teased him incessantly about the homemade dumplings his mother lovingly packed for him each day. He would often go hungry, sometimes throwing out his lunch so she couldn’t see that he wasn’t eating it. “I eventually had to ask her for peanut butter sandwiches instead.”
As busboy, delivery driver, and line cook, An worked his way through high school and university in restaurants as his love for food flourished. Even his final fine arts undergraduate project at the University of British Columbia was inspired by a sizable cookbook collection. “I did a philosophical portrait of Vancouver by cooking a five-course Charlie Trotter–style meal and took portrait photos of each dish in a studio setting,” he says. “It was a comparative examination of Vancouver as a multicultural city through the lens of food, incorporating seafood and other West Coast influences along with Chinese and Indian flavours.”
An’s creative oeuvre solidified his desire to pursue cooking instead of art, and he enrolled at New York’s French Culinary Institute (now known as the International Culinary Center) under the tutelage of industry luminaries including Jacques Pépin. From his apprenticeship at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s JoJo, he began his career in earnest at Montreal’s Toqué! restaurant. Chef/owner Normand Laprise was the consummate Zen master. “Normand gave me a lot of freedom—he let me experiment, and I grew a lot under him. Because of him, I found my independence and my confidence in the kitchen.”