In the hush of Tong Yin’s kitchen in Downtown Naples, June Dispongsa slows her stride and moves to the soft heartbeat of habit. Her grandmother’s fingers move in her own, tracing the ridges of a porcelain bowl, grating limes lined up for the evening’s curry.
June’s cutting board combines chaos and order—a riot of chilies sliced into ribbons, sun-bright turmeric, green coins of lemongrass and pale curls of shallot. This is not just food, but a language. Toasted cardamom whispers of monsoon mornings and the sound of rain slapping banana leaves. The perfume of coconut and ginger unlocks familial secrets as June makes curry paste from scratch, a one- to two-hour ritual increasingly rare in commercial kitchens. Grinding with a mortar and pestle yields a smooth and emulsified paste with a depth of flavor that is difficult to achieve with a machine.
“There is no shortcut to magic,” says June, who was born to Chinese parents in Thailand. “One meal takes every lesson, every misstep, every ancestor. It’s all a kind of conjuring.” That ethos has inspired a small empire of Asian restaurants created by June and her business partner, Somi Vasitorn, the group’s chef de cuisine. In the past four years, the two women have opened four Naples restaurants: Ichi Togarashi, Tong Yin, Sendo de Café and Mimoto.
Photography by Anna Nguyen
authentic asian food naples tong yin ingredients
With their rigor and region-specific menus, June and Somi have widened the idea of Asian dining in Southwest Florida. The region has long embraced international food, but mostly in broad, Americanized forms. Truly regional, lineage-rooted cooking has been rare, and chef-driven interpretations of those traditions even rarer. Their restaurants honor a distinct culinary diaspora—Thailand, Japan, China, Burma—while also celebrating the dishes that emerge from borderlands and crossroads. What unfolds in their kitchens isn’t culture blended for effect, but the natural migration of herbs, curries and spices.
Tonight, in Tong Yin, June prepares her grandmother’s khao soi, a velvety coconut curry noodle soup, its golden-yellow broth dressed in swaths of fiery red chili oil. The signature dish of Northern Thailand, the soup embodies the region’s history as a crossroads. Khao soi’s origins trace back to Chinese Muslim traders who introduced a Burmese-influenced noodle soup to northern Thailand, where the dish was adapted with local ingredients, like coconut milk. The sweet and grassy scent of coriander rises from the pan as shallots collapse and ginger and garlic sizzle. The soup arrives at the table in lacquered bowls minutes later, with coconut milk shining atop the ruby broth, a swirl of cream on fire. Each scent and sound is a layer in the restaurant’s fabric.
“Asian cuisine is a river shaped by tribute but also change,” she says. In their native Thailand, Chinese noodles, Vietnamese herbs, Japanese-style presentation and a dash of French empire have all found their way into the traditional cuisine over the centuries. What one may call fusion, another calls home. What, they wonder, is truly authentic? The question fails. Food, they believe, is a living language, a process of perpetual transformation. “This country is a melting pot—so many cultures, so many foods. Why would others not be as well?” June says, questioning the Western urge to draw rigid borders around Asian cuisines.
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authentic asian food naples ichi togarashi dining room
With their four restaurants, June Dispongsa and Somi Vasitorn challenge narrow ideas of authenticity. Asian cuisines have always been fluid, shaped by migration and trade; the duo restores the edges softened in American adaptation while honoring how recipes naturally evolve.
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authentic asian food naples ichi togarashi beef namtok
The Thai spicy beef namtok at Ichi Togarashi balances spicy, sweet, sour, salty and intensely savory notes.
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authentic asian food naples ichi togarashi drink options
Fluidity has long defined Asian cooking, but when the recipes traveled to America, the versions that emerged skewed softer and more uniform. Pad Thai got sweeter and thicker, Japanese sushi compressed into cream-laden rolls, Korean cooking distilled to tabletop barbecue and kimchi. Recipes lost heat, depth and many of the laborious techniques that defined them.
When June and Somi met in Naples in 2015, they discovered a kindred spirit and parallel pasts. Both grew up cooking at their grandmother’s elbow in Thai villages several miles apart. Both went on to study with Japanese masters in the United States, developing the formal rigor that underpins their approach to regional cooking. Both came from families that operate Michelin-starred restaurants in Thailand. And in their early 20s, both were drawn to Naples’ ever-evolving culinary scene. Here, they saw an opportunity for Thai flavors to shine beyond the modern-day interpretations.
A good Thai cook is a gatherer, an alchemist, a celebrant for the ephemeral. They learn early how ingredients behave—how heat, moisture and timing shift a dish by degrees. Somi’s education began in the pre-dawn hours of her childhood in Udon Thani, a Thai gateway town to Laos, renowned for its diverse cuisine featuring a thousand iterations of noodles and rice.
June earned her reverence for ingredients and hands-on processes in Bangkok’s open-air markets, where she learned to select ingredients by sight and scent, and in her grandmother’s kitchen, where she’d grate coconuts and pound pastes until her fingers were raw. Half a dozen family members circled her grandmother’s kitchen table every morning. “She wanted us to begin each day nourished, together. That flavor, that care, is the heart of this place,” June says about their flagship restaurant, Tong Yin.
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authentic asian food naples tong yin flagship
Their flagship, Tong Yin, is named for June’s grandmother. The menu reclaims the bold, herb-forward Thai cooking they grew up with through labor-intensive techniques and regional dishes like the coconut-curry soup khao soi and som tum papaya salad. “One meal takes every lesson, every misstep, every ancestor,” June says.
To honor the food they grew up with while still evolving it, June and Somi treat the fundamentals not as rules, but as starting points. Their restaurants offer a reclamation, restoring the edges and overlaps and letting regional stories surface in the bowl the way they always have: organically, inevitably. While the primary focus is on their native Thailand and the Japanese training that honed their technique, the restaurants celebrate a wider East and Southeast Asian diaspora with dishes born of border crossings and long-shared influences.
Ichi Togarashi, their first Naples restaurant, opened in 2022 after the pair relocated to Southwest Florida from Daytona. An ode to the vibrant flavors of Thailand, Japan, Korea, China, Singapore and Vietnam, the menu is a dialogue across borders, featuring dishes like the Thai rice noodle sukhothai, panko-coated pork tonkatsu and Vietnamese pho. The unifying thread is togarashi, the Japanese chili-and-citrus blend whose heat, brightness and aromatics work across regions. It offers a flexible backbone for a menu designed to move among six historically intertwined cuisines without forcing them into sameness.
Two years later, in 2024, the pair unveiled Tong Yin. The most autobiographical of their restaurants, it draws directly from their grandmothers’ kitchens. Vietnamese notes appear the way they did at home, through the herbs, broths and borderland exchanges that shaped everyday cooking. When they opened Tong Yin, the restaurant’s nuance and breadth of tradition marked a meaningful shift in how Asian food was represented locally.
Their journey continued with the birth of Sendo de Café, a tranquil, Japanese coffeehouse inspired by Tokyo sweets shops. There, the team draws on goho—the five classical Japanese cooking methods, from precise knife work to simmering, grilling, steaming and frying—to bring rigor to the humblest offerings. At the heart of the cafe is shokupan, the slow-risen milk bread they mix and proof each morning. Its cloud-soft crumb becomes the canvas for their sandos (Japanese sandwiches), where crusts are shaved clean, cutlets are fried so the panko stays audibly crisp and strawberries are arranged so the cross-section reveals a perfect blush.
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authentic asian food naples tong yin salad
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authentic asian food naples tong yin decor wall
Last year, they extended their Japanese explorations with Mimoto, a seafood bar offering sushi, sake and an omakase (chef’s choice) experience. Like most sushi restaurants, Mimoto imports the coldwater fish on its menu. Their shipments are flash-frozen at sea, then flown in overnight, but the chefs also take advantage of the Gulf’s bounty. The restaurant partners with Dilly’s Fish Co., a Naples dayboat operation that brings in fish hours after it leaves the water.
Mimoto’s pocket-sized kitchen adjoins Tong Yin, with 10 seats, including a four-guest chef’s counter. The contrast between the two restaurants reflects the breadth of the cultures the founders honor: Tong Yin’s reds and golds pulse with Thai warmth and heritage, while Mimoto embraces the pared-back calm of a Japanese home kitchen.
On a Saturday evening, chef Aon Ruangdech—who was recruited from a five-star Bangkok hotel—fillets a local yellowtail snapper, his blade angled just behind the gills, sliding across the backbone in one fluid motion. Somi’s brother, head chef Sun Jatupol, moves beside him, thinly slicing the firm flesh for hamachi that will be served immediately. Sun has been with June and Somi from the beginning; Aon joined while Somi has spent the last 10 months in Thailand caring for her father. In her absence, the team has rebalanced, with June and Sun floating among the four restaurants, guiding the team of chefs and cooks.
Surrounded by tubs of house-pickled tsukemono and squeeze bottles of shimmering sauces, Aon and Sun’s work blends intention with improvisation. Dishes like blue crab chawan mushi—a savory custard that catches the flavor of the Gulf—and nikujaga, a Japanese beef-and-potato stew reminiscent of an American comfort dish, reveal a shared truth: Across cultures and generations, love can be ladled into a bowl.
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authentic asian food naples mimoto san jatupol
At Mimoto, head chef Sun Jatupol works the 10-seat sushi bar alongside chef Aon Ruangdech. The restaurant partners with local dayboat operations for Gulf catches, which appear in dishes like the blue crab–shimeji–togarashi soup.
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authentic asian food naples mimoto soup
Four years into their work, they can already see a shift. Regulars who once stuck to pad Thai now return asking for larb, kanom jeen and the sharper, herb-forward dishes the women grew up eating. June says guests have become braver, trusting the kitchen enough to follow where it leads. That curiosity has opened space for more regional specificity—whether Isaan Thai’s sizzling heat or Lao-influenced som pla (fermented fish ceviche)—to be recognized for what they are: distinct expressions of a long, interconnected lineage.
For all their ventures, everything returns to Tong Yin. Here, the techniques, memories and migrations that shape their cooking settle into a memoir of a menu. “Tong Yin was my grandmom’s name,” June murmurs. “The root of the root.”
The restaurant’s udon green curry blends the duo’s Japanese training with a staple of June’s Bangkok cuisine, where royal and Chinese influences run deep. The ample sticky rice pairings—served with larb (a minced meat salad), green papaya and mung beans—speak to Somi’s Northeastern Isaan culture. As a child, she would help her grandmother prepare clay pots of sticky rice, each mound folded into bamboo baskets. Before the family ate, she would offer steaming bowls of the familial starch to nearby monks who depended on the morning alms. “Rice is comfort,” Somi likes to say. “And it is memory.”
Elsewhere on the menu, dishes like kanom jeen nam ya crab, rib larb and a citrusy—not creamy or sweet—tomyum soup nod to their most traditionalist instincts. And while you’ll find plenty of the American-Thai restaurant favorites, like pad Thai, June and Somi use traditional ingredients like tamarind paste, fish sauce and dried shrimp, while avoiding common Americanized additions like excessive sugar.
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authentic asian food naples sendo sushi bowl
The restaurants span different expressions of Asian dining—from Ichi Togarashi’s pan-Asian street food to Mimoto’s sushi bar to Sendo de Café’s Japanese coffeehouse. At each, June and Somi merge ancestral techniques with the discipline they learned under Japanese masters.
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authentic asian food naples sendo cat decor
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authentic asian food naples sendo comic
June brings forth a plate of miang kham, a traditional Thai and Laotian appetizer or snack, with its name translating to “a bite of goodness.” Made by wrapping various fresh ingredients in a wild betel or ‘cha plu’ leaf, the dish is known for its complex flavor profile, balancing sweet, sour, salty and spicy elements in a single mouthful.
On the platter, each ingredient is offered in its own small bowl: Wild betel leaves, heart-shaped and glossy, cradle toasted coconut, their edges dusted with gold. Lime cubes flecked with the bright scarlet of bird’s eye chilies. Pale shallots, peanuts, slips of ginger and garlic, the faint pink of dried shrimp. At the center, a dense sauce made from palm sugar and shrimp paste glistens.
In Thai culture, food is more than flavor. Each curl of steam is an offering to those who have passed and those seated at the table. Here, flames dance blue-white; chilies bruise, then dissolve; lime and lemongrass marry, and memories stir laughter.
June and Somi’s memories of gathering basil, eggplant and chilies from the family garden thread their trips to thriving Thai farms in South Florida, lush with lemongrass, basil, bitter melon and mango. With every new opening, June and Somi add another stitch to Naples’ culinary quilt.
Their beef khao soi is a prayer for lost matriarchs. Their green papaya salad is tart and thrilling, a love letter in acid and heat. Across menus, obsessive sourcing—from Thai palm sugar to regional rice varieties—roots their recipes. “Our grandmoms in the sky would be proud,” June whispers. “We want the next generations to know the true flavors, and to taste the stories inside them.”
Photography by Anna Nguyen
authentic asian food naples sendo strawberry dessert
Sendo de Café applies goho—the five classical Japanese cooking methods—to the simplest comforts. Slow-risen shokupan (milk bread) is their foundation. Sandwiches and toasts are cut into clean, geometric cross-sections that showcase meticulous layering. The strawberry cake roll with cheese foam and fresh berry topping.