New Dessert House satisfies a sweet tooth
By John Fladd
Some of Vasita Saktanaset’s favorite memories of growing up in Bangkok center around her grandmother’s cooking.
“She’s 82 years old right now and she’s still working,” Saktanaset said, “and her hobby is cooking. She actually used to like to open a small street restaurant. It was like a pop-up shop in front of the house. In Thailand you don’t have to have a health permit or anything like that. You can open up a restaurant and you can just say, oh today I want to sell something. You just unfold a table and you can sell it right away. She used to do that on and off for her hobbies. She loves cooking. So I grew up with a grandma who liked to feed me with her recipes.”
Saktanaset’s new restaurant, After Thai Dessert House in Concord, grew out of her love of Thai desserts. After she moved to New Hampshire, she found herself missing the sweets she grew up eating in Bangkok. There are many good Thai restaurants in the area, she said, but she found herself craving Thai desserts.
“I have a sweet tooth,” she said, “so I love dessert. I love bingsu [a treat made with shaved ice, condensed milk, and many, many other ingredients] and everything. And there’s no dessert shop around here — I mean Asian dessert shop. You have to drive like an hour to Boston to just grab a couple of bites of [Thai] ice cream or anything. It just made me miss my home country a little bit.”
Saktanaset’s husband and his family own the Siam Orchid Thai Bistro in Concord, and she said he encouraged her to open her own place.
“I saw the potential of this space downstairs from the Siam, and we already rent the whole building. [My husband said,] ‘Why don’t you use it for something that will earn money?’” At first, the idea was to open a dessert space for the restaurant upstairs, Sktanaset said, but soon the space took on a personality of its own, one that reflected hers.
“I just put all my passion in here — anything that I like. Sweets, sour foods, some cute stuff, snacks, everything here is something that I like,” she said.
Saktanaset noticed that many American desserts lacked complexity.
“The cake and foods you buy in bakeries here are a little too sweet for me,” she said. “Asian desserts are less sweet, softer in texture, and everything is light and fluffy.”
For instance, After Thai’s coconut cake is a moist cake that relies on most of its sweetness from the natural sugars in the coconut and is frosted with unsweetened whipped cream, which adds richness and even more moisture to the cake without covering up the flavor of the cream itself.
Strawberry Roti is a fusion of influences from Thailand, India and the United States.
“The roti [a flaky fried flatbread] is actually Indian,” Saktanaset said. “And you have condensed milk and strawberry sauce and condensed milk and just the whipped cream. This is street food in Thailand. It’s just like you can find anywhere there. They roll it up as a stick, but I think it’s a little hard to eat, so we adapted it a little and chopped the roti in pieces.”
After Thai serves a couple dozen desserts at any given time, including bingsu [the shaved ice], custards made with rice or taro, and bubble tea, with large tapioca pearls.
“I want to have more,” Saktanaset said, “but we want to find out what sells. Right now I only pick the ones that I like. Because if I want to have it, I can have it right away. That’s the key point of this dessert shop.”
After Thai Dessert House
Where: 4 Kennedy Lane, Concord, 229-8291
When: Thursdays 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 4 to 9 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays until 9:30 p.m., and Sundays until 9 p.m.
Desserts from After Thai can also be ordered through Siam Orchid Thai Bistro (12 N. Main St., Concord, 228-1529, siamorchid.net).
Featured photo: Courtesy photo.
