Vale Pontip Walpole, Sydney's queen of all things Thai

Any Sydney food lover visiting the section of Campbell Street, Haymarket, now known as Thaitown from the late 1980s to 2012 would remember the shop Pontip, and its warm and welcoming owner Pontip Walpole. Pontip died on Sunday, March 6.

Right at the time when we farangs (foreigners) were yearning to cook Thai food, Pontip was there with the ingredients, the know-how and the advice we needed. She was a force of nature who undoubtedly added to Sydney's increasing culinary sophistication.

Pontip Walpole (then Pontip Kulsawang) first came to Australia from Thailand in 1974. She then went to Europe, living for a while on a farm in Denmark, returned to Australia in 1977, and moved onto a farm in Coffs Harbour with a group of friends.

After 10 months on the farm, she came to Sydney and began studying, studies that were interrupted by marriage and the births of her four children. Although the family lived in a house in Wahroonga, she retained her connection with the North Coast and would go to Lismore regularly. "There were a lot of nurseries up there, with lychee and longan trees, and they couldn't sell them. I brought 200 of the trees back to Sydney, stored them at Wahroonga and sold them to Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian people," Walpole said in an interview some years ago.

She'd found a market, which she then developed. She contacted alternative farmers, persuading them to grow galangal, makrut limes and Thai basil. During the 1980s she sourced all the Thai ingredients we didn't then have in Sydney. Green pawpaw, for example.

By the time she opened her first Pontip shop in 1991, she was supplying David Thompson, Neil Perry, and most of Sydney's Thai restaurants. But she also supplied home cooks who were beginning to discover the joys of cooking Thai food. We'd descend on the shop with our shopping lists and questions, and Pontip would patiently answer them and offer recipes. Pontip's son, Ari, joined her in the shop, and I remember he would make fresh coconut milk that made our Thai green and red curries sing.

When Pontip sold the shop in 2012 she devoted her life to the Wat Phrayortkeo Dhammayanaram Lao Buddhist Temple, where a service was held for her.

The day before she died, Pontip picked the first mangos from the first tree she'd planted at her central coast home. A gardener to the end.

Pontip the shop is still at 16 Campbell Street, Haymarket.