Talésai in Studio City at night. (Courtesy of Talésai)
DESPITE BEING FROM THE SAME SMALL TOWN in Thailand’s Northern Lopburi Province, Noi and Chai Yenbamroong met later in life while working at a bank in Bangkok. By then, both had attended graduate school in the United States, and so when Chai’s eldest brother needed help opening a Studio City location of his popular West Hollywood restaurant Talésai, the newlyweds happily agreed to pick up their lives, cross the ocean, and join the venture.
Noi took on the role of chef, cooking recipes developed by her mother-in-law and making trips back home to train under prolific Thai cookbook author Srisamorn Kongpun. Chai handled the front of house operations, and hired a team of staff to support the influx of customers, many of whom worked in entertainment at the nearby Radford Studio Center lot.
Now, after more than 30 years in business and one pandemic, Talésai looks different. The West Hollywood location has been taken over by Night+Market, owned and operated by Noi and Chai’s nephew Kris Yenbamroong. The Studio City location has retained its identity, but undergone other changes.
The once bustling lunch service has been cut altogether due to the scaledown of in-person L.A. based production (the Radford lot defaulted on a $1.1 billion mortgage in January). The team is smaller now too, composed of only five members — almost all family, including Noi and Chai’s daughter Jean Yenbamroong, who’s been able to apply some new strategies to the decades-old family business she grew up in.
It was Jean who filled out The Receipts Questionnaire for us over email. Answers have been condensed very slightly for space and clarity.
Name of Restaurant
Talésai
Neighborhood
Studio City
Opening Date
May 1992 — she’s older than me and has always felt like an older sibling.
Operating Hours
5 p.m. - 9 p.m.-ish, on busier days we sometimes extend to 10 p.m.
Before Covid we were open 11:30 a.m. - 2 p.m. for lunch and 5:30 - 10:30 p.m. for dinner. For lunch we got a lot of business from studios (lunch meetings, large takeout orders, and catering). But when Covid hit and everyone started working from home, that completely went away. We can still do large takeout orders with advanced notice during lunch hours but not sure we’ve advertised that well.
Style of Service
Full service
# of Employees
Five-ish (mom, dad, daughter, aunt, and sometimes an extra server). We weren’t always this small! Covid made it this way and we’re slowly trying to grow again.
Typical Covers (Guests) Per Night
100 is probably the max (dining room holds around 50 at a time max so I'm thinking two turns of that), but we don’t get anywhere close, except maybe on Valentine’s Day.
Least Profitable Item on Menu
Anything with beef. We use high quality beef and don’t mark it up that much otherwise it would be a crazy price. And we already get complaints about price because people have an image that Thai food should be cheap.
Most Profitable Item on Menu
Everything else is about the same.
Chicken and beef satay from Talésai. (Courtesy of Talésai)
The dining room at Talésai. (Courtesy of Talésai)
Most Popular Item on Menu
Chicken pad Thai. Probably the most well known Thai dish in general which is funny because people don’t really eat pad Thai with chicken in Thailand. Usually there it comes with dried shrimp and/or tofu.
Slowest Night of the Week
Tuesday? But it’s kind of unpredictable.
There was a line in the Agi’s Counter article [an Eater NY interview with a Brooklyn restaurateur who is having trouble keeping his business open]: “There are daily struggles: food costs, labor, not enough labor, too much labor…” and I really felt that. Not having enough hands sucks. But it also sucks to bring in a ton of servers and have no customers that night. People rely on tips and it feels like we’re letting them down when we have them come in and it’s a slow night.
This unpredictability is why most weeknights it’s just my dad running FOH. He loves it and loves how personal he’s able to make the customer experience and how he gets to talk to every single person. But it also leaves him in a real pickle if it’s randomly busy and people can be unsympathetic.
It would help us predict how busy it will be if people defaulted to making reservations and honored the ones they do make! We don’t charge a cancellation fee and people have really taken advantage of that unfortunately.
Busiest Night of the Week
Saturday.
Tipping Structure
I guess it’s a pool! There are at most 3 people FOH (most of the time it’s just my dad) and everyone pitches in on serving, we don’t do sections. Tips are split evenly and 10 percent goes to the kitchen.
Annual Overhead Costs
(What percentage of your revenue goes to the following categories?)
Payroll: Approx 20-25 percent. Seems low because my parents don’t include themselves even though they do most of the work. And we’re not trying to cut costs here, we’d love to have more consistent staffing. Business has just been unpredictable and inconsistent.
Food cost: Approx 30 percent. We use high quality ingredients and only serve what we would eat ourselves! But that means higher food cost and complaints from people who expect Thai food to be a bargain. But for the ingredients we use, we really don’t mark it up a whole lot.
Repairs and maintenance: This varies the most but we’re about to take a big hit coming up with redoing our walk-in cooler. It’s served us for over 30 years needing consistent maintenance here and there but in the last few years the work needed kept getting larger and more expensive so we’re just going for it and replacing it completely. Hopefully it will serve us for another 30 years hah.
Subscriptions (Resy, Squarespace, POS, etc): Squarespace, Spotify, Square, Resy, and Canva. 10 percent — this is the one number that stands out to me as the others are pretty average. This is pretty high but unfortunately has become necessary for businesses.
Do you deliver? If so, what systems do you use?
UberEats/Postmates (which are now the same?), DoorDash, Grubhub.
We used to have in-house delivery with a pretty good customer base, but since the rise of these apps we’ve had to do away with that. Even though the apps are more expensive people just prefer the convenience and often have credit cards that give them a certain amount of discounts on those apps.
Some of our drivers even left to go drive full time for the apps because of the flexibility.
What’s a creative idea that’s worked for you financially?
Resy has probably been our best subscription. I brought this idea to my folks because I noticed that my friends and I would just browse Resy sometimes when we don’t know where to go for dinner. It’s a place people discover new restaurants and we don’t have a large social media presence yet.
I’ve really watched my folks adapt to a lot of technology in the years they’ve been running the restaurant and I’m glad I can help now. I work at Square as my day job and I got them set up with Square online ordering at the beginning of Covid. My mom has been learning Canva and my dad has been learning Instagram (I have to explain to him the connotations of emojis like how we cannot use 😋 🍆 even if we are talking about our delicious eggplant dish.)
I’m also so grateful for my little community. I have friends from elementary/middle/high school who have grown up hanging out with me at the restaurant and they’ve gone on to do great things and still think about us!
My friend who’s a copywriter has written blurbs for us to use on Resy. My friend who’s an art consultant has come over to help take photos of the food. My friend who works at Vogue shouted us out in an online piece. All of it makes me so happy and grateful to have such wonderful friends who also love Talésai.
Vanessa Anderson is a writer, culinary anthropologist, and the voice behind Grocery Goblin, a project that examines American culinary and consumer culture through the lens of the grocery store.
