James Beard Awards Receive a Shrug from SriPraPhai

It’s about the work, not the awards, at this woman-owned Thai restaurant in Woodside

Until recently, Sripraphai Tipmanee never heard of The James Beard Foundation, or its coveted awards. As a chef and restaurant owner in Queens for over 30 years, she hasn’t stopped to acknowledge the accolades her Woodside restaurant, SriPraPhai, has accumulated. The week SriPraPhai was nominated as a semifinalist for a James Beard Foundation Award, the 75-year-old was preoccupied with everything else on her plate. 

To be fair, neither Sripraphai nor her son, Larry Tipmanee, have heard of Edible Queens–or me– either. When I read they qualified for an “outstanding restaurant” award, I spent several days trying to track down the elusive restaurant owner–whose Thai cooking has earned endorsements from The New York Times and New York Magazine, consistently dominated “best of” lists like Zagat and The Infatuation, and remains the “most viewed” restaurant in Woodside (with over 2,200 reviews) on Yelp–to learn more about SriPraPhai’s journey to the Beards. I left multiple messages with staff–who were more interested in taking my order than facilitating a request for interview–before linking up with Larry for an introduction to his mother.

The day I finally meet Sripraphai, she is busy quality-controlling a catering order for the Royal Thai Consulate in Manhattan–––an honor the whole staff holds in high regard–––so I chat with her son, Larry. He asks me what I know of JBF and where the nominations go from here. I tell him he could think of it as the creme de la creme of the food world. 

The mother-son-duo haven’t always been turning 800 tables on an average weekend night. When Sripraphai moved to Queens in 1987 after immigrating to the Bronx as a nurse from the southern Thai province of Yala, she was simply looking for a bigger oven. Her custom cakes had once again taken off in popularity as was the case back in Thailand.  She scouted a place for a small bakery in Elmhurst, eventually offering a modest selection of takeout food for the Thai community. As a young child, Larry would zip around to deliver orders in Manhattan’s Chinatown.  Deliveries didn’t really spread the word about their brick-and-mortar bakery, but the food was revered, the clientele consistent. “I always listen to the customer,” Sripraphai says seriously and repeatedly throughout our interview. “Whatever they tell me to do, I do it.” 

At the urging of customers,  Sriprapha opened a restaurant in Woodside. There wasn’t much in the neighborhood in the early 90s, but she was there to serve the Thai community. “I have the cake,” she says with a wry smile. “They will come,” she told herself. And that they did. The menu started with a few traditional dishes–mostly pork and noodles–and has now grown to over 120 offerings featuring various regions of Thailand. Her Woodside space has since tripled in size and now has mostly stopped baking cakes and focuses on the food. 

Sripraphai is the definition of self-taught. She is a natural recipe developer, creating flavor profiles based on verbal descriptions. The most popular order, a crispy Chinese watercress salad, came about from a customer who recounted the only dish they tasted in Thailand that wasn’t offered at SriPraPhai. She hand-wrote it in Thai on the menu that day, and later added it as a permanent item in English.

If you’ve never tried the food at Sripraphai, let me share perhaps the only endorsement that really matters, the one Sripraphai herself shares with a big belly laugh. One time, three men were making repairs at the Woodside location, and, as the story goes, something caught flame in the basement where they were working. After convincing everyone to evacuate the restaurant, Sripraphai full-force doused the repair men in white powder from the fire extinguisher, then turned around to see a patron standing outside, slurping down noodles on the other side of the window. “They still tried to pay for their food,” she said. Most diners would have assumed their meal was on the house. 

It’s really that good.