Taweewat Hurapan: Rain chef trades in his rapier for kitchen knives

Nation's Restaurant News, June 14, 1999 by Bret Thorn

Taweewat Hurapan started helping his grandmother in her restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand, when he was 9 years old, waking at 4 a.m. to pound spices into curry paste before going to school. He wasn't exactly born to cook, however.

Hurapan's experiences have ranged from competing as an Olympic fencer to working as Thai Airways' station manager in Saigon in 1975, when he boarded the last Thai Airways plane as the North Vietnamese troops closed in. While he was working for Thai Airways, the airline sent him to Denmark for training in Continental food preparation and food management, giving him a handy skill to fall back on when he needed to supplement his income as a fencing coach at City University of New York. He meandered through Continental, Italian, Irish-German, even Native American restaurants before he found his calling at Rain, which serves Pan-Asian cuisine with heavy Thai influences at its two locations on New York's Upper East and Upper West sides.

Title: executive chef, Rain, New York City

Birth date: April, 11, 1950

Hometown: Bangkok, Thailand

Education: diploma in airline and hotel management from Siam Business School, Bangkok, Thailand, 1967; studies of continental food and food management at Scandinavian Airline Systems in Copenhagen, Denmark, 1970

Career Highlights: executive chef at Rain

How did you get interested in fencing?

My father was the secretary of the International Olympic Committee for Thailand. I started fencing to help him. I ended up training others at Bangkok's colleges. I won the Oceania championships in 1972. That got me into the Olympics that year as team captain, but I was overconfident and lost in the first round. But in Montreal in 1976 I got to the quarterfinals before I injured myself against Romania. They should have had me compete with just one weapon instead of both epee and saber, but they didn't have enough of a budget. Still, I came in 19th out of 160 competitors.

What brought you to the United States?

I was first in the U.S. from 1952 to 1959. My dad, who was a captain in the Thai air force, was a military attache in Washington at that time.

Then in 1978 I came to the U.S. just on vacation, actually. But I was still hot from the Olympics, so I applied to be the head fencing coach at Columbia University and City College of New York. Columbia offered me a position as assistant coach. I didn't realize Columbia was a top-l0 competitor in fencing, so I took CCNY's offer as head coach instead.

To make extra money, I worked at West Side Story, a continental restaurant in New York's Upper West Side that experimented a little bit with Asian food, like gai yang, Thai roasted chicken; red curry; and some stir-fry.

I had to open the restaurant by 6 a.m. After lunch I would prepare everything for dinner, and then by 6 p.m. I would leave and go to C.C.N.Y. to coach.

Then in 1982 I started working at Lord Jim on 50th and Broadway in the mornings. In the afternoons I worked at West Side Story, and I was at C.C.N.Y. in the evenings.

Why did you end up choosing cooking as your full-time career instead of fencing?

I got tired of having to start over every year after my best students graduated. When I told C.C.N.Y. I wanted to leave, they offered to double my salary; but I left anyway. They still have a trophy named after me, the Hurapan Trophy, given to the school's top fencer each year.

Has fencing influenced your cooking at all?

Fencing requires timing and depth perception. At West Side Story I had eight omelet pans going at once. We had lines outside the door. Because of my training in fencing, I had good timing. It also helps in reading people's minds, because in fencing you have to read your opponent's mind and also the judge's mind. So I can also judge the customers very easily.

How did you start making Native American food?

There was a restaurant called Silverbird on the Upper West Side in 1985. The chef ran away, so they hired me.

Actually, we were creating new cuisine, but in the spirit of Native American food. I studied from an encyclopedia the foods that different tribes ate. I had to learn that, while the Mohawk eat fish, the Comanche don't eat anything that has a "spirit from the waters." So you couldn't make a dish called "Comanche blue trout" for example. My cooks were Comanche, Lakota Sioux and Blackfoot, and the owner was Navajo, so I learned a lot from them.

But I modified the food. I used fry bread to make sandwiches. I made rattlesnake appetizers with blue corn chips. And used a lot of game meat. Native Americans use a lot of herbs and berries to flavor game meat. They don't use any liquor for cooking, so you can't use red wine, but you can use fruit.

If the owners hadn't fought with each other so much, it would have been a great place. But they were losing so much money, and then they had legal debts.

So you went hack to Continental food?

Yeah, but finally I thought: "I'm Asian. I'm working with pasta and making great pizza, but my name is Taweewat, not Tony." I decided, if I'm going to do this thing right, I'm going to have to do my own food.