VIVIN: The Farmers Market Table That Became One of Bangkok's Best French Bistros
Interviewed by Timo Eckenfels, Veloura Gems · In conversation with Samantha, co-founder of VIVIN, Bangkok
VIVIN started with one table and one product at the Bangkok farmers market in 2013. Today it is three branches, a production kitchen, a full bistro menu that changes every month, and one of the more honest food stories in the city: an Australian Thai fashion buyer turned food writer, a Frenchman with a Lausanne hospitality education, and a plan that was never supposed to last past three months.
This is that story, told mostly in their own words.
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Timo Eckenfels
Timo has been to VIVIN twice now, and liked it every time. He sat down with co-founder Samantha to hear the full story behind it, from a single table at the Bangkok farmers market in 2013 to three branches across the city today.
From Selling Shoes in Melbourne to a Table at the Bangkok Farmers Market
Samantha describes herself as "a banana, white on the inside, yellow on the outside." Australian raised, with a Thai mother, she moved to Thailand at 27, on what was meant to be a three month plan to learn the language.
"Three months becomes six. Six becomes a year. Two years, five years, ten years, twenty years later, and I still don't speak Thai," she says, laughing. "Not fluent. It's different, listen to my accent. When you're born into a Western language and your first language is English, it's extremely hard to learn the tones."
Before Thailand, she had already lived a fairly restless working life. She dropped out of university in Melbourne ("the bus ride was too long and I have a very short attention span") and went straight into retail, selling shoes at a market, then clothes in shopping malls, working her way up from supervisor to manager to window dresser to fashion buyer. It was the fashion buying job that first brought her to Thailand, on sourcing trips, mostly to Thailand and Hong Kong.
"Three months becomes six. Six becomes a year. Two years, five years, ten years, twenty years later, and I still don't speak Thai."
Samantha, co-founder of VIVIN
"There was that period where I had an epiphany, and I thought, I need to be in Thailand," she says. She had visited before, but only as a tourist, staying with family, shopping, going out. Actually living there, she says, is a different thing entirely.
Her first proper landing in Bangkok was not glamorous. "You know the movie The Beach? There's that scene with the horrible guesthouse, cockroaches, people shouting, fighting with each other. It was almost exactly that."
A Frenchman at an Australian Pool Party
Samantha spent her first years in Bangkok making the most of the city. "Every night, party, drinking, other stuff. I don't know if I enjoyed myself, of course I enjoyed myself for many years, but then I got serious and I got most of it out of my system."
She met her husband Nicolas, a Frenchman, at an Australia Day pool party. "A French person at an Australian pool party. I was like, what are you doing here?"
They bonded properly not long after, during one of Thailand's periods of political unrest, when the two of them ended up isolated together in Hua Hin with a curfew in place and not much else to do.
Their first business together had nothing to do with food. They imported and sold MILF Sunglasses, a French ski and snowboard brand out of the Alps whose name is genuinely an acronym for Made In La France. They sold online and through a handful of shops, a skate shop in Siam Square, a wake park, hotel boutiques in Phuket. They were participants in a launch party called Sunglasses at Night, got close to the early Bangkok Wonderfruit and Colors crowd, and once ran a promotional booth built around a baby pool.
It did not work out. "Surprise," Samantha says. But it taught them both a lot, especially about marketing, and it is where their partnership as entrepreneurs really started.
One Table, One Terrine, 2013
By the time the sunglasses business wound down, Samantha was also writing about food, contributing pieces to Bangkok 101 and Bangkok Post on the city's F&B industry. She wrote an article about the farmers market, and as a thank you, the organisers offered her a free table.
She brought the idea to Nicolas. Unlike the sunglasses venture, this one drew directly on what he actually knew: ten years in five star hospitality after training at the Lausanne Hotel School in Switzerland, including a stage at a three Michelin star restaurant. He is not a trained chef, but he came out of that world with serious kitchen instincts and a clear idea of what good charcuterie should taste like, something he says he simply could not find on the retail shelves in Bangkok at the time.
So he made his mother's terrine recipe. As a twist, alongside the classic French version, they made a second batch finished with a Thai spirit instead, sourced early on from Chalong Bay in Phuket, back when the rum still had its original "pirate label" from its very first year on the market.
That was VIVIN's real beginning: one table, one product, at the weekend farmers market, alongside artisans who are now well known names in Bangkok's small producer scene, cheesemakers, charcutiers and bakers building their businesses at the same time. Nicolas worked closely with several of the cheesemakers from their earliest stage, giving feedback on quality control and how to think commercially about a product that started as a passion project.
"That was the golden era of the farmers market," Samantha says. "It was booming. People were genuinely excited to discover local artisanal products."
From Market Stall to Real Doors
What followed was several years of hustle. At one point, Samantha and Nicolas were running stalls at three or four different markets in the same week. "It was insane. In the heat," she says. Eventually they scaled that back and moved toward permanent retail: a kiosk in the Central Chidlom food hall and a small counter inside EmQuartier, each running for a few years.
Somewhere in this period they built their own production kitchen and pushed through FDA registration for their products, a process Samantha credits largely to Nicolas. "Back then you could still get FDA approval for inner city production. Now you can't. It was a lot of work and expensive, but it was worth it."
Their first standalone shop opened in 2019.
How Covid Turned a Wholesale Supplier Into a Grocery, Then a Sandwich Shop, Then a Bistro
Before Covid, VIVIN's main business was wholesale, supplying hotels and restaurants with charcuterie and cheese. When the pandemic hit, more than three quarters of that revenue disappeared within a month.
They pivoted almost overnight. Restaurants were being ordered to close, but supermarkets were allowed to stay open, so the VIVIN showroom and office became a grocery. They filled their own shelves with product from the artisans they already knew, ran it like a private boutique, customers rang a doorbell, were let in one group at a time, masks on, then locked the door behind them again.
"It was almost like a private experience," Samantha says.
As Grab and Foodpanda took off in Bangkok, they pivoted again, this time into baguette sandwiches, something nobody else was really doing at that time. Nicolas was in the kitchen making them himself.
When restaurants were finally allowed to reopen, VIVIN pivoted a third time, into a proper bistro, with a menu built on secondhand tables and chairs and a handful of dishes that are still core to the menu today: a duck confit, a steak haché, and a fluffy souffle omelette.
The Seasonal Menu, and a Chef Who Started as an Intern
VIVIN now runs on a monthly seasonal menu, built around a single organic ingredient each month. Every cycle, the team has to come up with at least four new dishes from that one ingredient, develop and test each one, taste and refine it, shoot it for the menu, then launch it, all within the month.
"These days, you can't go to many bistros and find a whole monthly seasonal menu based on organic ingredients," Samantha says.
The chef behind execution today started at VIVIN as an intern. "He's like, I'm just an intern. I'm like, not anymore, you're my chef," Samantha says. He is now VIVIN's operations manager and head chef.
The Thai Cheese Buffet That Started as a Covid Rescue Mission
One of VIVIN's best known ideas came directly out of the pandemic. A handful of small Thai cheesemakers they had been mentoring since the farmers market days suddenly had finished cheese ready to sell, and nowhere to sell it, with restaurants and hotels shut.
"He's a little bit like the savior," Samantha says of Nicolas, who bought up the surplus cheese outright, unsure at first what they would even do with it.
The answer was the Thai Cheese Buffet: an all you can eat event priced at what Samantha calls "a stupid price," around 890 THB per person at launch, to move the surplus and, just as importantly, to get skeptical customers to actually try Thai cheese. The buffet is now 1,190 THB per person.
The tactic she settled on came from bringing Thai cheese to friends' house parties. She would stop mentioning where it was actually from until after people had tried it. "I stopped mentioning it was from Thailand. I'd just say, try this for us. And they'd say, oh, this is delicious, where's it from in France?" European friends in particular, she says, were often judgmental before they even tasted it, once they knew it was Thai cheese.
The idea grew into a full campaign, the Thai Cheese Tour, styled like a rock tour, bringing the buffet concept to Michelin recognised restaurants and five star hotels in Phuket, Chiang Mai, Koh Yao Noi and Bangkok over the course of a year. VIVIN still uses custom forks from that campaign today.
Behind the scenes, the cheese program has real technical backing. Nicolas and Samantha worked hands on with producers from their earliest stage, brought samples back to France for feedback from Meilleur Ouvrier de France cheesemakers including Pierre Gay, and fed that professional feedback back into the recipes.
Ninety Nine Percent Thai, and a Kitchen That Refuses to Waste Anything
Sourcing is close to a mission statement at VIVIN. By Samantha's count, around 99 percent of what they use is Thai, natural, artisanal, and certified organic wherever certification is actually available (seasonal Thai vegetables, she points out, are not always organic year round, since organic certification depends on the season).
"It should just be in the nature of things not to waste. We don't have to promote it."
Samantha, co-founder of VIVIN
The short list of what is not Thai: French AOP butter, Italian olive oil, French mustard, Italian truffles, and salmon from Tasmania. Everything else on the menu, and on the shelves, is Thai.
There is a similar principle behind how the kitchen handles waste, which is to say, it tries not to have any. Vegetable trim becomes the daily soup. Leftover viennoiserie, croissants, pain au chocolat, Danish, raisin bread, becomes a croissant bread and butter pudding, invented specifically to use up pastry that was going stale a day old rather than throw it out or hand it to staff who were already sick of eating it.
"It should just be in the nature of things not to waste," Samantha says. "We don't have to promote it."
Three Branches, No Outside Investors
VIVIN, incidentally, is Nicolas's own surname, not a coined brand name.
Their original 2019 shop was in Ekkamai. It closed in August 2023 and relocated to become the Thonglor branch. The newest branch, opened around September 2025, is a restored all-wooden heritage house on Sukhumvit Soi 22 in Khlong Tan, near Phrom Phong, with three floors of café, grocery, bistro and lounge, almost certainly the newest, biggest space and the one-year anniversary Samantha mentions in the conversation.
VIVIN Asok, a café, grocery and bistro at 33/1 Soi Sukhumvit 19, is the branch Samantha calls the flagship. Staff across the business runs between 20 and 25 people. Samantha and Nicolas have built the entire thing themselves, with no outside partners or investors.
"We are legit, a family business, the two of us," Samantha says. "That's very hard, but it was the right decision, because when we control things, we control the quality, and we make decisions quickly."
"We are legit, a family business, the two of us. That's very hard, but it was the right decision, because when we control things, we control the quality, and we make decisions quickly."
Samantha, co-founder of VIVIN
They are open, cautiously, to the right kind of partnership going forward, particularly hotel collaborations where VIVIN runs the food and beverage program under its own brand without owning the real estate, and to a few more, likely smaller format, VIVIN locations over the next decade. What they are not interested in is losing control of quality for the sake of scale.
There is also a personal note behind that caution. Both in their late forties, Samantha and Nicolas talk openly about wanting the business to eventually give them their time back. "I want my job and my work to remain a choice and a pleasure," Samantha says. "If I'm attached to it at all times, I won't even be able to welcome people the right way."
What to Order
A handful of dishes come up again and again as what regulars order: the fluffy souffle omelette, a full Jambon-Fromage, the Khao Soi duck confit, the hanger steak, and the spring summer salad when it's in season. For something lighter, the Thai cheese and cold cut platter draws straight from VIVIN's own artisan cheese program.
And if you are at the table when the croissant pudding is on the menu, order it. It is, by Samantha's own admission, one of her favourites, and it exists purely because they refused to throw away a day old croissant.
Where to Find VIVIN, and What Is Next
VIVIN Asok, café, grocery and bistro: 33/1 Soi Sukhumvit 19, Khlong Tan Nuea, Watthana, Bangkok 10110
VIVIN Suk 22, café, grocery and bistro: 267/5 Sukhumvit Soi 22, Khlong Tan, Khlong Toei, Bangkok, near Phrom Phong
The best way to keep up with VIVIN's calendar, events and any new openings is Instagram, @vivinthailand, where their schedule is always pinned to the top of the page.
Before You Visit
Veloura Member Perk
VIVIN is an official Veloura partner venue in Bangkok. With a minimum spend of THB 500, Veloura members receive one complimentary Croissant Pudding or Thai Tea Egg Custard on their visit. The offer can be redeemed once per table only.
Download the Veloura app, join the membership, and show your unique QR Code to redeem it.
Not a member yet? Download the Veloura app using the link below.
VIVIN is a Veloura partner venue in Bangkok. This guide is based on a conversation with Samantha, conducted by the Veloura team. For more Bangkok guides, explore our guides at veloura-gems.com/guide.
Veloura App
A Free Dessert at VIVIN.
Get a free Croissant Pudding or Thai Tea Egg Custard with a minimum spend of THB 500. Download the Veloura app and become a member to unlock this and other perks at VIVIN and partner venues across Bangkok.
