Arnold’s Ode to Patti’s House Salad
Chef Arnold Myint chats about the past, present, and future of International Market and his mother’s signature house salad.
When Patti and Win Myint opened International Market in 1975, it quickly became a city darling. The half-Thai restaurant half-store shuttered in 2018 after Patti passed away, and the double loss was deeply felt by the community. Now her children, Anna and Arnold, are reopening International Market with Anna running the front of house and Arnold leading the kitchen. While the space and some menu items may be new, it is important to the Myints to maintain the family atmosphere that many locals found synonymous with their restaurant. Chef Arnold Myint chats with us about the past, present, and future of International Market.
chef arnold myint of international market
How has your culinary experience evolved the traditional Thai menu that International Market was known for?
I told my sister, if we’re gonna do this, I still have to be a chef. I still have to have my POV and my voice. I have all these vendors that I’ve sourced locally. We do a whole-fried chicken at night. The remains become my chicken stock during the day, which used to be my mom’s boiled chicken and chicken powder. That’s the nuance of me putting a little bit of modernism and my savvy into it. The quality is a little more tweaked and in terms of the execution, it's more consistent.
What is an original International Market dish that you have reimagined for the new menu?
My mother’s signature dish was called Patti’s House Salad. It was an interactive salad bar buffet with about 30 different things, all small diced, mise-d out in ramekins, with some rice noodles, a bunch of lettuce leaves, rice paper, and one protein, like sweet pork. You take this lettuce leaf and pile one of every unique ingredient—pickled ginger, pickled garlic, lime rind, peanuts, all the herbs that she grew, chile pepper—and it all goes in this one little parcel. Her requirement was the first bite had to be a whole bite—pop the whole thing in your mouth and let the flavors explode. She’d require a week's advance notice, and then she would sit there for days and days prepping these vegetables—fine dicing everything, putting it out meticulously. It was a very big spectacle back in the day.
How did you make Patti’s House Salad your own?
I came to realize she pulled [Patti’s House Salad] from a Thai dish called miang kham. I had it on my last trip to Thailand by the beach. It was a betel leaf cone and inside was dried shrimp and toasted coconut, and the sauce was coconut paste, ground with a mortar and pestle until the paste juiced into a liquid. I was like, wow, something that rustic became so grand in my mom’s vision and now I identify that dish as something so refined.
So, I do miang kham that’s mixed in a bowl, and I call it a lettuce wrap so it's approachable to the consumer (recipe on page 87). It’s all of the flavors that I loved when I had my mom’s house salad. The beauty behind it is the textural differences and the unexpected ingredients; the peanuts really add crunch; it has toasted coconut which is sweet and salty and textural. It has lime—she was very adamant about using the lime rind, not only to get the citrus and the moisture, but you also get that bitter back, that oily taste, and that textural chewy bite that’s so unexpected. There’s fried shallots and we have herbs that my grandmother brought over from Thailand. A little small sprig from our makrut lime tree. We have it in the restaurant and we pick and chiffonade that for herbaceousness. That’s a taste of our family from back in the day coming into every single dish. And of course, the betel leaf sets it off in a different way. It’s organic, it's earthy, a little bitter, and has a really nice mouth feel. [Patti] served hers with a sweet, tart tamarind reduction. So I do. It’s interesting. It's hearty. It's consumer-friendly and it's dishwasher-friendly. No thirty ramekins.
Miang Kham Lettuce Wraps: Pressed Tofu, Coconut, Lemongrass Makrut Lime, Shallot, Peanut, Betel Leaves, and Tamarind Sauce | Photos: Will blunt
What type of legacy have your parents left in the city of Nashville?
My parents really unapologetically put their footprint on the city in a way where you couldn’t argue. Their legacy is building a sense of family and community where a lot of people did not have someone they identified with, or felt was a safe place. The people that I see every single day are what remind me of my parents’ legacy; people from all walks of life, all genres, that found some kind of identity or identified with my mother in what she served: a humble plate of food.
How do you hope to carry on that legacy?
I hope that I honor them well. I think that I’ve been very lucky to be able to have what has come into my life thus far. I’m at a place where I get up and I just get to go cook food that I want to eat and share it with my friends. It wouldn’t have been this way if it weren’t for them. Discovering your voice or having your voice heard through food is important in so many ways. My legacy would be the continuation of theirs, because if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have found my voice.
