A Chat with Jonathan Bayer of SKYICE
Here’s a combo you don’t see every day, at least not in the same restaurant: Thai food and ice cream. While you might venture for this creamy dessert after dinner, SkyIce gives you both entities in one sitting. Owned by husband and wife team Jonathan Bayer and Sutheera Denprapa, their spot on 5th Avenue serves savory Thai plates and ice cream flavors inspired by the like, with offerings like durian, white miso almond, green curry, and more. We sat down with co-owner Bayer to talk about the restaurant, his upbringing in the New York culinary world, and why he and Sutheera feel at home in the Park Slope neighborhood.
Can you tell me a little bit about your background in food and how you got interested in Thai cuisine?
Well, I have always been interested in food! I love to eat. Definitely love to eat. Growing up, we used to go out to eat quite a bit. My mother was a fantastic cook, had some amazing home cooked meals but we’d also go out to eat so I was always interested in restaurants and how they functioned. So I was exposed to very good food at an early age, which helped round out the palette. We also traveled a lot so I was eating food across the pond, on the West Coast, so I was exposed to a lot of different cuisines at an early age.
Are you from the West Coast?
No, no. Born and raised in New York. My family’s been here for about 150 years. Actually my great grandmother, when they opened up the tenement museum on the lower east side, she was honored as one of the living remaining original tenants of the actual Tenement building. Like, she was actually born in the museum. Where the museum stands was her apartment when she was a little girl so we date back to then.
So I’ve always had a love for food. I worked as a bus boy in high school at an amazing steakhouse in Huntington, Long Island and I waitered in restaurants and after graduating school I actually went to Wall Street. So finance is my background. And then, after various roles throughout finance I decided to go back into food.
What got you interested in Thai food?
Well my wife is Thai, born and raised in Bangkok. We actually started with ice cream in mind. My wife is a self-taught ice cream maven. She’s an artist by trade so she’s wildly creative and thinks up these flavors. But she’s also a huge ice cream fan so she started wanting to eat ice cream that she could not find on the market and her first flavor was Thai tea. She couldn’t find it anywhere and one day she woke up and was just like, “I’m gonna make Thai tea ice cream.”
So yeah she whipped up a batch, it took her about 6 months to make and perfect the formula and then we had this amazing homemade ice cream. We started to get really positive feed back from family and friends and we decided to just go for it and open up a shop. We weren’t sure how the winters were going to treat us. It turns out ice cream is a 12-month season but in order for us to kind of hedge we said, “Let’s offer some food.” So we offered a very small menu, some curry, some noodles, some appetizers, and we started to get a really great response from the food. So we said, “Alright, let’s expand this!” into what we have today, which is this really large, expansive, authentic, very traditional Thai food menu.
Did you learn the ropes of Thai cooking from your wife?
I would say I can cook. I don’t cook here. I would love to take credit but a lot of the recipes have my influence, my palette, what I like to eat. It’s kind of incorporated that into how we serve, the different flavors I really want to highlight. Thai food is so eclectic, there’s so many different flavors going on. And New York has many many Thai restaurants so I think through the volume, it’s lot some of its cachet. We wanted to kind of bring that back and pick up on the kaffir lime, the lemongrass, the tamarind, really get in touch with those amazing flavors that all kind of mix to make this amazing cuisine. So my influence is more in the recipes rather than doing the cooking.
How did you come to choose the Park Slope neighborhood for the business?
So we just celebrated seven years here. It didn’t look like this eight years ago when we first moved in so the neighborhood here in the North Slope. South slope was always very strong but over the last 7 to 8 years it’s really grown up around us. We looked all over. We hit it with this one. We knew we wanted to be in a family neighborhood because we had ice cream and we wanted something that was definitely family-friendly so we knew we wanted to be in that type of neighborhood. Trial and error found this location.
What would you say is one of your highlight ice cream flavors?
You know we get this question all the time and it’s such a hard question to answer because there are literally 15 flavors. We’ll have groups of people that come in just for durian ice cream. It’s popular, durian is a great flavor. There’s Thai tea, there’s the raspberry cilantro, the cucumber lime, white miso with almonds, the banana Nutella, the Belgian chocolate brownie, the roasted Thai coconut, Thai coffee. These are all really popular flavors.
