Meet the 81-year-old former nurse behind a popular Thai restaurant in Queens

Every Sunday, Sripraphai Tipmanee, 81, makes the ice cream at SriPraPhai herself.

She opened the restaurant 34 years ago in Woodside, Queens, and still dreams up different ice cream flavors like Thai iced tea, durian and coconut, which she makes weekly. Each has to meet her standard for silky smoothness.

And since SriPraPhai opened, the local Thai American community — which Tipmanee played a big role in feeding — has grown around the section of Woodside Avenue now known as Little Thailand Way.

Tipmanee's entrepreneurial streak dates to the 1980s, when she was living in Thailand's southernmost province, Yala, where she grew up and spent her early adulthood. Her husband died 80 days after she gave birth to their son, Lersak Tipmanee.

Tipmanee was a nurse at the time and supplemented her income with a cake business. She remembered some words of encouragement from an aunt, who told her: “Look, everybody in a family has a birthday, and it happens every year.”

The United States opened immigration pathways for nurses in the 1980s, and Tipmanee emigrated to the Bronx, which once had a larger Thai American community. She worked at the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital (now called BronxCare Health System) while baking cakes on the side.

She saw her fellow Thai nurses were paying huge premiums to send electric appliances back home, where they cost much more. Tipmanee sensed a business opportunity and quit her nursing job to start an export business, Bangkok Trading, which helped send appliances back to Thailand at lower costs.

She later ran a dry cleaning business in Woodside and started a bakery in Elmhurst. During the winter holidays, she kept her cakes cold on the rooftop of her Astoria apartment because customer orders had outgrown her refrigerator space.

“I’ve done everything I could here,” Tipmanee said as she sat at the table in the back of her spacious restaurant.

In 1990, she opened SriPraPhai, which at the time served up a mini-menu of Thai pastries and a few hot meals. She shut down the Elmhurst bakery when she developed an allergy to an ingredient in the cakes.

“But only after I made every old customer [of the bakery] come to the new place,” she said. “Once the last one came to SriPraPhai, I closed [the bakery].”

She said that back then, all of her customers were Thai immigrants missing a taste of home. She jotted down requests for khao man gai (delicate steamed chicken with rice and broth), chicken basil stir fry, beef noodle soup, pork offal soup, catfish curry — and would only make particular dishes if she knew there was a demand for them.

Tipmanee perfected the recipes one by one, adding each dish to the steadily growing menu. In the early 2000s, she passed down her recipes to a newly hired chef, Ing Singhern.

The restaurant already drew long lines. The New York Times reviewed SriPraPhai in 2004, which Tipmanee said attracted more white Americans to her restaurant. And elsewhere in Woodside, the neighborhood now known as Little Manila was beginning to coalesce, ushering in an even more diverse clientele.

Crowds got so thick that Tipmanee installed a numbered ticketing system. And when the properties on either side of SriPraPhai became available, she bought them with money she borrowed from family members.

Her son Lersak opened a second SriPraPhai in Williston Park, on Long Island, in 2009. He spent his childhood between Jackson Heights and Thailand, where he was raised by his grandmother and aunt. He later obtained a master's degree in business administration from Hofstra University and worked for the Belgian KBC Bank in Bangkok. Lersak had intended to run his own business, and instead of creating it from scratch, he decided to return to New York and build on his mother’s restaurant.

Consistency at SriPraPhai has kept the customers coming back through the decades. None of Tipmanee's recipes have changed. To decrease variables, all sauces and seasonings are made in huge batches. Chef Singhern is still in the kitchen.

All these factors have combined to produce the restaurant's ethereal fried catfish: a crackly cloud that contains neither flour nor egg batter, and is ground so finely that customers question if there's actually any fish in it. The tom zapp — or chicken soup — is a balance of savory and tangy from toasted red chiles, makrut lime leaf and galangal. The soft-shell crabs might be some of the biggest and meatiest to land on a plate. And the chicken curry puffs sync beautifully with the cucumber chile vinegar sauce.

Speaking of consistency, Tipmanee still has no plans to retire. We met on a Sunday, and she left to churn her coconut ice cream after our interview.