Couple Brings Thai Flavors Straight from New Hampshire

Fourth in a weekly series profiling Brookline chefs and sharing their favorite summer recipes.

Just 12 years ago, Jim Brown had never tried Thai food. Now he owns his own restaurant.

A former quality control manager from Maine, Brown is the unlikely restaurateur behind MJ Ready, a small and deceptively named restaurant that serves up Italian pasta, American breakfasts, espresso and a full menu of Thai dishes.

Brown, who moved to Chestnut Hill from New Hampshire last year, owes his sudden career change to a few twists of fate that brought him in touch with his wife, Mayuree, a Thai immigrant who runs the restaurant's tiny kitchen in Coolidge Corner. The couple opened the new restaurant in shoebox storefront inside the Arcade Building last year after leaving behind a successful Thai restaurant – and much less successful video rental business – in Dover, N.H.

The move has meant going from being the first and only Thai restaurant in town, to being just one of four or five within a two-block radius. But Brown said his wife isn't afraid of the competition.

"What amazes me, what really amazes me here is we're getting the same comments I did in New Hampshire," he said. "People are saying, 'It's the best pad Thai I've ever had.'"

The Browns met in the late 1990s when Mayuree, or May for short, was working at the first Thai restaurant in Portland, ME. A native of northeast Thailand who had already launched a successful shoe manufacturing company in Bangkok, May had decided to move to the United States a few years earlier after a divorce. Jim Brown, also recently divorced, was working at a computer manufacturer and looking around for a new wife.

But two years after the couple married in 2000, Jim Brown realized his company wasn't going to survive the bursting of the dotcom bubble, so the Browns decided to sell their house in Maine and move to Dover to open the town's first Thai restaurant, though Brown himself hadn't tried Thai until four years earlier.

"We put it all in and crossed our finger," he said. "I just hoped she could cook."

The 60-seat restaurant, called Thai Sweet Pepper, turned out to be a success, and the Browns were about to move into a larger space several years later when Jim was diagnosed with cancer. Stuck with two leases and a shortage of time, the couple decided to sell the restaurant and do something less demanding with their new retail space.

It was after that second business failed and Jim began to recover that they decided it was time for a change.

"We looked everywhere," Jim said. "We put 200 miles a day on the van, and this went on for months."

The couple finally settled on the tiny space in the Arcade Building, even though Jim thought it looked like a "museum." In order to keep some of the customers of the Italian café that had been there before, they decided to serve some pasta dishes, including pesto with penne and fettuccine alfredo, and keep the espresso machine running.

MJ Ready offers a fairly familiar Thai menu of Drunken Noodles, Rad Nar and curries, but also features some items, like a Laotian rice dish called Lap, that reflect May's upbringing in northeast Thailand.

After nine months, the couple is still getting used to their new space, where May does all the cooking with just a six-burner stove and a deep fryer. May would like to have a larger space, but the couple doesn't want to move more than a couple of block and risk losing the loyal customers they already have.

"People in New Hampshire would drive tens of miles," Jim said. "Here it's different."

Pad Thai by Mayuree Brown
  
Ingredients:

•   2 tablespoons vegetable oil (approx.)
•   5 ounces chicken breast, sliced
•   3 shrimp (size 21/25) peeled and deveined
•   10 ounces medium rice noodles (soak in cold water four to six hours and drain)
•   1 handful (more or less) fresh bean sprouts
•   1/6 cup fish sauce
•   1/6 cup vinegar
•   1/3 cup sugar
•   1/2 cup chicken stock
•   1/6 cup ground or finely chopped peanuts
•   1 tablespoon chopped salted turnip
•   1/2 tablespoon minced garlic
•   scallion or green onion, sliced about 1 1/2 inches
•     (about two shoots or to your taste)
•   1 egg, beaten
•   shredded carrot strips to your tatse (optional)

Garnishments:

•   1/2 lemon slice
•   2 ounces ground or finely chopped peanuts
•   small handful fresh bean sprouts

Directions:

Heat a 12-inch pan (or wok if you have one) over medium heat: add vegetable oil to coat pan. Stir in egg, garlic and turnip. Add chicken and stir. Add shrimp and stir. Add noodles and stir until noodles are somewhat soft. Add vinegar and fish sauce and stir. Add chicken stock to soften noodles further. Add sugar, stirring  constantly. Add ground peanuts, scallions, bean sprouts and carrots. Stir until mixed. Taste. If too sour, add more sugar; if too sweet, add more vinegar. Turn onto plate and garnish with ground peanuts, fresh bean sprouts and lemon slice on the side. Fresh scallion can also be added on the top.