While her classmates hit the playground after school, seven-year-old Palisa Anderson would race home every afternoon to tend to the chrysanthemum she had given to her mother. The plant came to life and flowered. "I would talk to it," said Anderson.
Anderson's love of plants translated into Boon Luck Farm, a coastal enclave near Byron Bay, about a seven-hour drive north of Sydney, that is connected to her family's chain of Thai restaurants. But Anderson isn't your typical rural Australian farmer. The daughter of Thai immigrants, she grew up in an apartment in a Sydney suburb before setting off for London and then returning home almost a decade ago to join the family business, a chain of cafés across Sydney, beginning with the now-iconic Chat Thai. Launched by Anderson's mother, Amy, in 1989, Chat Thai stands out among a crowded field of Thai players in Sydney. The Anderson family's restaurants are acclaimed for their authenticity and complexity. The New York Times has called Boon Cafe "iconoclastic," and much of that has to do with the freshness of the ingredients.
"I've always been very connected to food and curious about how it comes to market," said Anderson. "My mum and I would do a lot of farm tours to our suppliers to find out what they were doing to get us certain volumes of produce." This curiosity advanced to the stage where a tropical-fruit grower convinced her to buy a vacant plot of land in the Byron shire in 2016.
Boon Luck Farm grows dozens of different fruits, vegetables and herbs. "And never just one variety of one thing!" said Anderson. Currently, the farm is growing chokos (also known as chayote), lots of varieties of pumpkins and eggplants, Asian favorites like gai lan and bok choy, carrots, ginger, fresh turmeric, turnips, peanuts, persimmons, jujubes, mulberries, Brazilian cherries, pandan and 30 kinds of citrus. These include Japanese sudachi limes, kaffir limes and Australian finger limes. There are also lesser known fruits, such as peanut butter fruit and miracle fruit, the latter of which is being trialed on cancer patients to help them regain their sense of taste. While many of the plants sound like exotic one-offs, they're used extensively in Thai cooking.