BY MEG VAN HUYGEN for WEEKLY VOLCANO 1/30/26 |
“Hi, hi, hi! Meg and Stephen!” Noppassorn “Blue” Numdee calls to me and my partner as we walk in the door at Bloom Thai. “My friends! I’ll be there in one second!” She physically runs into the kitchen.
I’d be flattered, but she seems to be on a first-name basis with every single person in the room. We’re all her friends because we go to her restaurant, and because she remembers everybody and everything.
The restaurant is an old teriyaki takeout joint in a strip mall, and it’s butts to nuts as we stand in the foyer with the other guests, waiting variously for tables or takeout. “Have you been here before?” a man asks us. The woman he’s with adds, “Oh my god, it’s so good. Everything is SO GOOD.”
Stephen exuberantly replies that we have, several times. The woman laughs. “Okay, so you know!”
“Oh ho ho, we know,” he replies sagely.
Numdee’s daughter Jasmine receives us and seats us in lieu of her mom. We ask how her premed program is going; she says it’s a pain to commute to college every day, but she’s doing well. Chef Blue appears, greets us, and lets us know what’s good today, rather than asking us what we’d like. I think we ordered two specific dishes on this visit, but we find the move is to just let Chef start bringing dishes out and pay whatever she charges us, gratefully, at the end.
Bloom Thai opened in the spring of 2024, born out of a Thai cuisine pop-up that Chef Blue and her husband, Boom Suebsahagarn, ran for years at festivals in SeaTac and South Seattle. Seemingly an amalgamation of their names, Bloom is a family affair: Boom works in the kitchen alongside his wife, and their four kids are in and out of the cast.
Originally from Bangkok, Chef Blue’s menu includes urban street food, American faves like pad thai and garlic fried chicken, and unique Thai-influenced dishes from Blue’s own brain. She also does a few dishes that folks usually eat at home in Thailand and are more elusive in American Thai restaurants. It’s all super affordable, too, with generously sized entrées maxing out at $20, each one easily enough to feed two.
Don’t be dissuaded by the crowd at the door, by the way. Bloom does a brisk takeout business in addition to dine-in. “The takeout orders are mostly people from the military base,” Numdee says, “since we’re so close. When the government shutdown happened, all my friends disappeared, because no one had money for Thai food! I’m so glad they’re back.”
On this visit, the spread we receive includes money bags—deep-fried wonton pouches filled with herb-loaded ground pork and shrimp and tied shut with green onions—and a steaming dish of pad kee mao (a.k.a. drunken noodles), which is served with crab tonight, a special. We also had a platter of kana moo krob, crispy deep-fried pork belly with the crackling skin on, stir-fried with Chinese broccoli, and Chef brings out bowls of coconutty tom kha as well. There’s mountains of rice and Thai coffee with sweetened condensed milk. Blue gifts us a colorful little tin container of white pepper with Thai script on it, as well as a tiny bottle of fish sauce.
The table of young people seated next to us marvel at the white pepper tin, and we get to chatting. They say they drove down from North Seattle after seeing an Instagram reel of Bloom’s beautiful food. “And now we drive down like every other weekend!” Blue comes over and introduces them, by name, of course. Some folks standing around chime in to say they always get the Bangkok garlic chicken every time, because “We can’t stop thinking about it all week,” but the food on tables looks amazing. Blue knows them, too, of course, and tells us their names. By the end of the evening, we’ve all followed each other on social media.
It’s clearly a gift, among many that this woman has. It seems ridiculous to say that her incredibly delicious food ISN’T the point of going to her restaurant, and as the crowd of takeout picker-uppers attests, it is delicious. But the point for me is to go inside, sit in the room, eat the food, and immerse myself in Bloom as a social experience. You’re there because you’re hungry, but in this very grim era in American history, you’re ideally also there to meet your neighbors and learn things from them. Chef Blue is doing important social work out here, effortlessly connecting strangers and turning them into friends, and I see it happening every time I go to Bloom Thai. Sincerely. It’s an ongoing party at this place, everyone’s invited, and Chef Blue is the best hostess in town.
