I grew up in Surin, in the northeast of Thailand, where the food you eat and the medicine you take are not separate things.

My father was the person people came to. Someone would arrive at the house with a fever, a bad stomach, a joint that would not settle, and he would go out and come back with what he needed. Roots, bark, leaves, things I could not have named then. He had learned it the way it is always learned there, from the person before him. Nothing was written down.

I did not think of it as knowledge at the time. It was just my father, and it was just Tuesday.

I left, the way people do. I have lived in New York for years now. I run a café on Greenwich Avenue where I am behind the counter four days a week, and I spent a long stretch of that time eating badly, sleeping badly, and treating my own body as the last thing on the list.

What brought me back to it was noticing how Thai food gets served in America. Sweeter, heavier, built for delivery. Delicious, and almost the opposite of what the same dishes are at home, where the balance of a meal is the entire point. Nobody in my village used the word wellness. They just cooked.

So I went and studied the framework underneath it. I trained in Ayurveda at Kripalu, which gave me language for things my father did by instinct: why a body running hot wants one thing and a body running cold wants another, and why the same dish is not right for everyone in the room.

Sukhālaya is those two things put together. Thai home cooking and Thai herbal tradition, explained with enough structure to actually use.

Sukh means happiness. Ālaya means a dwelling, a place where something lives. A place where ease lives. That is what I am trying to build, and it starts at the table.