For Pat Hatch, cooking Thai food started long before she and her husband, Richard, began serving customers from a bright orange food truck in Montrose.
Pat grew up in Bangkok, Thailand, and studied cooking in college before becoming a teacher. Food remained a big part of her life, including cooking vegetarian meals for community gatherings that sometimes fed 200 to 300 people.
“I like cooking,” Pat said. “I’ve cooked all my life and when I lived in Thailand.”
Today, she and Richard are the owners of Pat Thai, which serves a wide range of Thai dishes from its food truck parked outside The Association in Montrose.
The couple moved to Montrose to be closer to Pat’s sister, Anchie, who lives in Ridgway and helps at the truck on weekends.
But Pat Thai actually got its start years earlier in New Mexico.
Pat came to the United States in 2015 and eventually made her way to the Farmington area, where she worked for about two and a half years at a Thai restaurant. Its owner, a Thai woman who had previously worked as a chef in Thailand, taught Pat her recipes.
When the owner was ready to move on, Richard bought the restaurant as a wedding gift for Pat. The couple renamed it Pat Thai and operated the business until the COVID-19 pandemic ultimately forced them to close.
After moving to Montrose, they decided to bring Pat Thai back — this time as a food truck.
They purchased the orange truck and fixed it up before opening in Montrose last year. Pat Thai initially parked downtown at Demoret Park before moving to The Association, where the Hatches say the business has found a better fit.
“We caught on really quickly compared to how we were doing it on Main Street,” Richard said.
Part of that, he said, is the variety of people coming through The Association.
“They have quite a diverse crowd that comes here,” he said.
The setup also makes running a food truck considerably easier. The Association provides access to water and electricity, and customers can take their food inside and sit at a table. Richard said the truck now generally only needs to leave to refill propane and handle other necessities.
Pat Thai’s menu ranges from familiar Thai staples such as pad Thai, pad see ew, drunken noodles and fried rice to stir-fried dishes including cashew nut chicken, ginger chicken and pad kra pao.
There are also tom kha kai and tom yum goong soups and several curries, including yellow, red and green curry.
Vegetarian cooking remains particularly important to Pat, tracing back to the large vegetarian meals she helped prepare in Thailand. The truck offers vegetarian dishes, and many items on the menu are marked gluten-free or can be adapted for different dietary needs.
Pat also puts an emphasis on the ingredients she uses. She said the business recently switched to rice bran oil as part of an effort to offer ingredients she feels good about serving customers.
“We have good ingredients, quality ingredients,” she said.
Cooking in Montrose draws on both what she learned growing up in Thailand and what she picked up after coming to the United States.
“When I came to America, I learned a lot fast,” she said, explaining that she already had years of experience cooking in Thailand.
The business remains largely a family operation. Pat and Richard run the truck together, with Anchie joining them on weekends.
Zoey helps serve and runs the business’ social media.
Family was also a major reason Pat came to the United States in the first place. She wanted greater educational opportunities for her children, daughters Becky and Zoey and son Natthakhom, whom Richard later adopted.
Richard recalled Becky learning English in part by watching television with closed captions, using them to help teach herself how to read and write the language. She later went to college in Los Angeles to study film.
For Pat and Richard, the orange food truck in Montrose is the latest version of a business (and a family story) that has traveled from Thailand to New Mexico and now western Colorado.
And after losing the original Pat Thai during the pandemic, Richard said the new location has helped the business catch on.
Pat seems pretty happy with the arrangement, too.
“It’s a very good place,” she said of The Association. “They takes good care of us.”
Justin Tubbs is the Montrose Business Times editor. He can be reached by email at justin@montrosebusinesstimes.com or by phone at 970-765-0915 or mobile at 254-246-2260.
