Restaurateur and locally renowned musician Jay Pun is 100 percent Thai. But he still thinks a lot about authenticity.
In 2016, Pun traveled to his ancestral home and visited an open-air market in northern Thailand. He was on the hunt for a native lute known as a phin. He’d owned one years before, but it was decorative, nothing authentic.
Pun and his cousins happened upon a local luthier at the market. The Charlottesville native, whose family opened the area’s first Thai restaurant in 1997, bought one of the instruments—essentially a three-stringed guitar—brought it home, and began writing songs. He quickly fell in love with the instrument’s tones and traditions.
“It was similar to the way I think about food,” Pun says. “Even though I am Thai, I didn’t want it to be a gimmick and appropriate the music of another culture.”
Wanting deeply to do the phin justice, Pun researched its history. He took an online class with a Thai phin player, who pointed out the ways Pun naturally brought his Americanized influence to the instrument. He continued to work at it.
Pun formally learned his musicianship at Berklee College of Music. It was there that he also met his wife and other half of the successful world beat duo Morwenna Lasko & Jay Pun. While his family grew its local culinary footprint—they now own Thai Cuisine & Noodle House and Chimm—Pun and his wife produced several albums of their guitar and violin music, and toured around Virginia.
Lasko and Pun are still working on new music, but kids, responsibilities, and the pandemic have conspired to slow them down. And in early 2021, tragedy struck, and it deepened Pun’s love of his own heritage: Eight women of Asian descent were shot and killed while working at a spa in Atlanta. “That was a pinnacle point in my life. I came out as Asian,” Pun says.
Despite being rooted in Thai traditions since birth, Pun says he had largely assimilated to white culture. It was simply what he knew his entire life. But the Atlanta shooting woke him up and made him realize that Charlottesville in many ways doesn’t know its Asian community. Many in the community don’t even know one another.
At Chimm, Pun likes to push palates. While so much of U.S.-based Asian cuisine is watered down for local tastes, he says Charlottesville has embraced many authentic culinary styles.
And with the phin, Pun continues to push his own musical palate. He’s particularly taken with the music of northeastern Thailand. As he begins thinking about the area, its food also springs to his mind.
“It’s a bit different—it’s very spicy on its own, where a lot of the food in central Thailand is not,” he says. In the northeast, the Thai people often eat with their hands, Pun says, taking handfuls of glutinous rice and using it much as Ethiopian people use injera to scoop up delicacies. It’s a type of cuisine that has only recently started to move West.
When Pun’s family opened their first restaurant a quarter century ago, even the more Americanized version of Thai cuisine was considered adventurous.
And while the States might not be ready for traditional phin music, the time may come for that, as well.
“It’s cheesy, but it’s true—there’s a beauty that comes from the way music and food bring people together,” Pun says. “Look at any culture: blues coming from enslaved people and singing about what they’re eating and about being in the kitchen. Music and food are completely entangled.”