June 12, 2026

Can a Stinky Fruit Be a Delicious Bite?

At PRU in Phuket, Jimmy Ophorst distils his entire philosophy into a single dish of durian.

Phuket was never meant to be a culinary destination. For decades, the island on the Andaman Sea was a byword for flawless beaches, opulent resorts and the nocturnal pull of Pa Tong. Nobody boarded a plane to dine there. And then a Dutch cook who had landed on a three-month contract began, without hurry, to change the way the world understood what this island could bring to the table.

That cook is Jimmy Ophorst, and the restaurant he raised from an empty plot is called PRU. It opened in November 2016 and claimed the island’s first Michelin star in 2018. Two years later it became the first restaurant in Thailand to be awarded a Michelin Green Star, the sustainability distinction the guide is now phasing out worldwide. In 2023 it moved into a building of its own, fitted with solar panels, where the kitchen and the dining room share the same air and the ocean appears beyond the windows like a living backdrop.

To grasp what is cooked at PRU, it helps to begin at the end of the menu and, at the same time, at its very start: the dish that greets every guest the moment they sit down. Before anything else arrives the durian. It is neither an eccentricity nor a party trick. It is the statement of intent for the entire house, and the most eloquent proof of how Ophorst understands his craft.

Jimmy Ophorst arrived in Phuket on a three-month contract and never left.

The experience begins before the table, in the lounge.

Every cocktail built by hand, with the same care as the kitchen.

The King of Fruits

For those who have never met it, durian is a tropical fruit the size of a rugby ball, sheathed in an armour of thorns so sharp it is harvested wearing a helmet. Beneath that carapace lies a pale, creamy flesh, arranged in segments around large seeds, with a flavour its devotees compare to an English custard perfumed with almond, vanilla and caramelised banana. Across Southeast Asia it is known as the king of fruits, and for centuries it was a delicacy reserved for Siamese royalty.

The trouble is the smell. So penetrating and insistent that countless hotels, airports and public transport networks across Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia expressly ban it from their premises. Few fruits divide opinion so sharply, capable of inspiring the most absolute devotion and the most visceral rejection, often within the same person. Ophorst himself belonged to the second camp for years.

“The first time I tried it, the day I arrived in Thailand, it was absolutely horrible,” the chef recalls. He did not go near the fruit again for a long while. That this very fruit, the one that once struck him as impossible, should now open his menu says a great deal about the creative stubbornness that defines PRU. “I had to make it happen to put it on the menu without those stinky flavours,” he says. The research took him six years.

Since 2023, PRU has occupied its own solar-panelled building, with the Andaman Sea as its backdrop.

PRU’s kitchen runs on unfamiliar ingredients, many of them rare fruits grown only in this corner of Thailand. The most daunting of them all was the durian.

Six Years to Tame an Aroma

The method Ophorst arrived at is as counter-intuitive as it is elegant. The durians are picked underripe and left to ripen indoors until they tip past their peak, into the overripe. Therein lies the secret: the fruit first reaches its point of maximum pungency and, once that threshold is crossed, the volatile sulphur compounds responsible for the smell begin to dissipate. Only then, fully overripe, is it baked whole in a wood-fired oven for eight to twelve hours and smoked for a further ninety minutes. With the heat, the gas that dwells inside the fruit finishes evaporating, and the two things so many people cannot abide vanish at once: the stench and the fibrous texture.

What remains is a flesh that becomes a silky mousse, frozen and served cold. Ophorst neither hides the fruit nor disguises its origin: he names the dish The King of Fruits, the very title under which durian reigns across Asia. It is accompanied by locally produced caviar and by sea grapes, those tiny algae that burst on the palate with a saline snap. Salt against sweetness, the ocean against the fruit. The caviar comes from a kaluga sturgeon farm in Hua Hin, two hours from Bangkok, where a Russian breeder achieved a young product carrying barely two per cent salt. The figure is no accident: it is precisely what balances the sweetness of the durian without overwhelming it.

The result is a bite that could not exist anywhere else in the world. And that singularity springs not from technique alone, but from everything that underpins it.

Six years of trial and error went into taming the durian for the menu.

The King of Fruits, durian turned silky and smokeless, with caviar and sea grapes.

A Terroir Called Thailand

PRU’s founding idea was radical for the Asia of the last decade: one hundred per cent Thai ingredients, everything sourced from within the country. A year before the restaurant opened, Ophorst and the maître d’ of the time were already building their own farm, Pru Jampa, a short drive from the present dining room. Across its four acres, ducks, hens and geese are kept for their eggs, alongside melons, pumpkins, courgettes, a small orchard of mango, pomegranate and rose apple, and every herb and edible flower the kitchen might call for.

In the early years, the farm supplied between fifteen and twenty per cent of the larder. And then Ophorst made a decision that runs against everything expected of a sustainable restaurant: he deliberately shrank it, to between three and five per cent. The money he would have spent expanding it he preferred to place in the hands of the smallholders who truly needed it. Self-sufficiency, that tempting tale the fine-dining world likes to tell, interested him less than weaving a network.

Today that network gathers some hundred and fifty growers scattered across the country, each of whom the chef has visited in person. With them he has learned to buy differently. When a farmer’s mango crop collapses and the price will not even cover the picking, Ophorst takes everything there is, five hundred kilos or sixteen hundred, whatever it may be. “By doing that, we know that next year he can still produce. And we will be the first one he calls,” he explains. The gesture, which looks like generosity, is also his finest sourcing strategy: when one of those growers has something extraordinary, ten kilos of a rare fruit borne by only two trees, or sea grapes nobody had bothered to commercialise, PRU is the first phone to ring. The durian arrives by that same route.

Beneath all of it runs a way of understanding life that Ophorst absorbed from the island. “Here, people believe that if you do good, you will get good,” says the chef, who arrived at twenty-two on a brief contract, found a Thai wife, had a son and never left. That philosophy, closer to Buddhism than to gastronomy, explains the network of growers better than any speech about food miles. The name itself distils it: PRU comes from the village where the farm sits, and unfolds into plant, raise and understand. In the dialect of southern Thailand it also denotes the place where water and land meet and new life begins.

Thailand’s magnificent lobster: when a fisherman lands something exceptional, PRU is the first phone to ring.

From a network of 150 small producers, Ophorst visits one by one across Thailand.

A Cuisine Without a Label

Defining what happens in PRU’s kitchen is so difficult that not even Ophorst manages it. “I’m still struggling when people ask me what we cook,” he admits. “We work with unknown, rare, tiny ingredients, and we prepare them in our own way, with some modern European technique behind it. From shrimp paste to lobster.” It is not Thai cooking, though Thai flavours are there. Nor is it European. It is intense, at times disconcerting, and it does not aspire to please everyone.

Besides the durian, only one other element stays fixed on the menu: the duck, the protein Ophorst considers the finest in the country. He serves no beef, because there is few in Thailand, nor pork, out of respect for guests whose faith forbids it. And the cellar, with six hundred and fifty references and two pairings to choose from, reveals just how far the ambition of the house reaches into the glass.

Duck: the only other fixture on the menu, and the finest protein Ophorst finds in Thailand.

PRU turns ten in 2026, and Ophorst marks the anniversary by extending the building to house a chef’s table. His long-term ambition he states without flinching: that there be people who fly to Phuket for the sole purpose of dining at that tiny restaurant. Asked how he would like to be remembered, he answers in three words: an honest, humble person.

And then there is the durian. The most feared fruit of the tropics, banned across half of Southeast Asia, transformed by hands and by time into the opening bite of a memorable dinner. If anything sums up the cooking of Jimmy Ophorst and the way he honours the island that took him in, it is precisely this: the ability to take what almost nobody wants and return it as a delicacy that exists only here.

Read More