BU Alum Chompon Boonnak Runs Mahaniyom, One of Greater Boston’s Hottest Thai Restaurants
The tapas-style restaurant has received rave reviews from patrons and media alike
BU Alum Chompon Boonnak Runs Mahaniyom, One of Greater Boston’s Hottest Thai Restaurants
BU Alum Chompon Boonnak Runs Mahaniyom, One of Greater Boston’s Hottest Thai Restaurants
Chompon “Boong” Boonnak feels most at home behind a bar, inventing new cocktails. It’s a departure from the beginnings of his career journey, when he worked in computer science and finance.
Now these days at Mahaniyom, the Thai restaurant in Brookline, Mass., he co-owns, the Boston University alum has created an exciting lineup of classic cocktails with Thai twists—think a martini made with rambutan juice (a fruit similar to lychee) or a Sazerac made with Thai tea–infused rye whiskey.
But the food is also where the Brookline Village spot shines. Boonnak bills Mahaniyom, which opened in February 2020, as a “Thai tapas-style” restaurant, with smaller, shareable plates and a robust drink menu. Boonnak and his team focus on sourcing the freshest ingredients and offering dishes not found at most Thai restaurants in Greater Boston. Yes, Mahaniyom has a pad thai, which Boonnak says is one of the most popular dishes. But almost as popular are the kang pu, a southern Thai crab curry, served with vermicelli, and the salt-and-pepper pork cheeks, spiced up with Thai chilis.
“I think what sets us apart is we do a different style of Thai food. Nobody does it like us. And we make everything from scratch—we even make our curry paste in-house,” says Boonnak (MET’13).
Boonnak’s cocktails receive the same meticulous attention. He wanted to make sure the drinks balanced out the spicy and sour flavors of the dishes. The Song in My Heart cocktail is a riff on the classic Tom Collins, pairing Vietnamese gin with a homemade cantaloupe pandan cordial and soda water. To make the cordial, Boonnak uses a sous vide method to infuse freshly juiced cantaloupe with pandan, a plant with an earthy, vanilla-like taste that’s a popular flavoring in Thai desserts.
Boonnak ensures that every drink he comes up with has a nod to Thai flavors. A gin martini special, for example, has lemongrass infused into its vermouth.
But bartending—and eventually owning a much-lauded restaurant—wasn’t always in the cards for Boonnak. He grew up in a province north of Bangkok and studied computer science. For a time, he worked as a programmer for a financial trading company. His parents, whose friend ran a Thai restaurant in Boston, encouraged him to move to the city and earn a master’s degree in finance at BU.
He heeded their advice. For two years, he worked at his family friend’s restaurant while studying to improve his English. Then he attended BU’s Metropolitan College and earned a master’s in administrative studies, with a concentration in financial economics.
To make some extra money, he worked part-time at various restaurants in roles ranging from food deliverer to server to assistant manager. During that time, he realized he enjoyed learning about American cocktail culture, and when he got an opportunity to work as a bartender, he was hooked.
Boonnak prepares a Song in My Heart cocktail, a riff on the classic Tom Collins, pairing Vietnamese gin with a homemade cantaloupe pandan cordial and soda water. To make the cordial, he uses a sous vide method to infuse freshly juiced cantaloupe with pandan, a plant with an earthy, vanilla-like taste that’s a popular flavoring in Thai desserts.
After graduating from BU, Boonnak had a full-time job in sales for a Japanese food distributor. But he couldn’t shake his love for mixology. He landed a part-time bartending gig at the Chinese restaurant Golden Temple in Brookline, a family-owned institution that’s been around for more than half a century.
“I was just like, ‘Oh my God. This is perfect. I want to do this,’” he says.
Boonnak had also fallen in love with Boston, and he soon met his future wife. After his time at Golden Temple, he took a bartending job at Shojo, a popular modern Asian restaurant in Chinatown known for its inventive cocktails. “At the time,” he says, “craft cocktails were becoming really popular, and I wanted to pursue that.”
He worked at Shojo for almost four years when he got a call from his childhood friend Smuch Saikamthorn, who studied at Northeastern when Boonnak was at BU—the two had been roommates at the time. Saikamthorn had moved to San Diego and opened a traditional Thai restaurant there, but was looking to move back to Boston. He wanted to know if Boonnak would open a restaurant with him.
Until then, Boonnak hadn’t imagined running a restaurant. One thing he knew: if he was going to start a restaurant, it had to be something very different.
“I didn’t want to do a traditional Thai restaurant. I didn’t want to mainly do takeout,” he says. What Boonnak proposed was creating something inspired by Thailand’s ran lao, casual bars with shareable small plates.
A restaurant’s first year of business is never easy, but Mahaniyom’s first year was especially tough because of the unfortunate timing. “We officially opened on February 24, 2020, which was three weeks before Boston shut down for COVID-19,” he says.
But those first few weeks before pandemic shutdowns were promising. “There was a lot of hype about us on social media,” he says. “We had people waiting for tables. It was great.”
After pandemic closures, Boonnak was forced to focus on the restaurant model he hadn’t wanted to pursue: takeout.
“We don’t really do takeout in Thailand. You go to the bar, you go to the restaurant, and you eat. You don’t even bring the food home,” he says. “The food that we designed is better eaten at our restaurant. Like, if you put our fried chicken into containers, it gets soggy.”
Boonnak says he owes the restaurant’s success during peak pandemic closures to the support of other local area chefs. The renowned Boston chefs and restaurateurs Tracy Chang and Ken Oringer recruited Mahaniyom to participate in the nonprofit program Off Their Plate, which provided meals to frontline workers (part of the donations to the organization went towards employee wages). “They were like, ‘We don’t want you to fail,’” Boonnak recalls. “It was so lucky. It helped us a lot, because the takeout business wasn’t enough.”
Despite the rough patch during the peak of the pandemic, Mahaniyom quickly began grabbing the attention of local foodies and food media. It was named Eater Boston’s Best New Restaurant in 2021. In 2022, Boston Globe food critic Devra First gave Mahaniyom a rare five-star review, writing, “It brings us the Thai food we deserve, with a beverage program to match.” And in April 2024, Mahaniyom made it on the New York Times “25 Best Restaurants in Boston Right Now” list.
“It’s great. It’s a big deal,” Boonnak says of the accolades. “One thing I feel is behind all this success is that I have a really great team. But we not only focus on the food and the drinks, we also focus on the people and the hospitality.”
Boonnak demonstrates how to make the Pure Sin cocktail, his take on a rum old-fashioned. The drink features cachaca, a Brazilian spirit, pandan syrup, and jasmine bitters.
After Mahaniyom’s success, Boonnak was inspired to open another spot, Merai, an “elevated dive bar,” with global-inspired dishes with Thai flavors. Merai opened in Brookline Village in June 2024, just a two-minute walk up the street from Mahaniyom.
“I’ve always dreamed of having a dive bar, just a casual place where people can go,” he says. Merai (which means alcohol in Thai) is already earning praise for its cocktails, like the Lucky Sunny (made with mezcal, turmeric, honey, and coffee liqueur), and fun food options, like the house-made kra pao hot dog, inspired by a Thai spicy basil chicken dish.
“We want to showcase that we are not just about Thai food, but that we are passionate about other things too,” Boonnak says. “Really, we just want people to enjoy our food, enjoy our drink, and enjoy our vibe.”
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