Remembering Patti Myint

Forty-three years ago, a beautiful young Thai immigrant walked five blocks north on Belmont Boulevard from her home at the corner of Linden to the corner of Bernard, where she contemplated a boarded-up storefront with a sale sign. She was a recent graduate of Trevecca Nazarene University and newlywed unsure of her personal and professional path in Nashville.

The red brick building had clearly seen better days when it was an H.G. Hill grocery store, serving a neighborhood that had also seen better days. Once-grand four-squares and charming Craftsman-style bungalows lined the boulevard and side streets, but many of their original owners had moved to Green Hills or further south, out of the county. Many of the houses they left were chopped up into duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes, rented by absentee landlords to Belmont College students and professors, as well as aspiring musicians and songwriters drawn by the proximity to Music Row. The area was considered by many to be unsafe and undesirable. But Patti Myint — born Prapasri Kopsombut on Feb. 15, 1945, one of nine children of grocery store owners in Bangkok — saw opportunity.

“I saw this building, all boarded up with a sale sign on it,” Patti Myint told the Scene in 2003. “I thought maybe I could do something with it.”

Patti and her husband Win Myint, a social justice activist and math professor at Tennessee State University, bought the rundown building and renovated it themselves. In 1975, they opened it as International Market & Restaurant. It turned out to be Nashville’s first authentic Asian market and Thai restaurant, a gathering place for other newly arrived immigrants and the port of entry into ethnic dining for generations of locals raised on biscuits, fried chicken and squash casserole. In the process, it branched and blossomed into a remarkable American success story and an enduring gift to the Southern town that the Myints made home.

On Sept. 30, Patti’s children Arnold and Anna shared a Facebook post saying their mother had suffered a cardiac episode two days earlier. Prayers in multiple faiths were fervently offered for her recovery. Shortly after word wound through the community that Patti had passed away on the evening of Oct. 6, the tables and chairs outside International Market became an impromptu memorial for the woman known by her own children and thousands of employees and customers as Mama Myint. There were notes of sorrow, endearment, gratitude and love tucked into bouquets of flowers.

“She called everyone she served, everyone who worked for her, ‘my children,’ ” says Anna. “They called her Mama Myint. It means everything how much people loved her. It is keeping us together now.”

Two days after their mother died, Anna and her brother are sitting at a table in the restaurant where they grew up, finalizing details for the visitation, Buddhist ceremony, celebration of life and reception that are to take place over two days. They also talk about the history of the market.

The genesis of International Market was very much a team effort by the newlyweds, with Patti handling the food and service, and Win on duty when he wasn’t at TSU. Before they opened — and for some time after — the couple drove a van to Chicago to get products not available south of the Mason-Dixon. Their very first customer was another female entrepreneur, dynamo and neighbor, jewelry designer Margaret Ellis, who would become a lifelong friend of the family.

“Margaret was curious about everything, so it’s not surprising she was their first customer,” says Arnold. “She asked if they had Indian food, which didn’t exist in Nashville then. Our dad said no, but he was from Burma and knew how to cook it, so he went into the kitchen and made her something. He told her, ‘We call ourselves international, and we are!’ ”

The opening menu was simple and tended toward Chinese, which Patti thought locals would be more familiar with: egg rolls, fried rice and broccoli with noodles, along with eggplant curry and hot cabbage with pork. There were a few booths and a steam table with seven items, each priced at 35 cents. But the restaurant was not an overnight success.

“Belmont was a very different neighborhood then,” Patti said in 2003. “It was hard to get people to try new things. The Belmont students did not come here to eat. The first day, I sold $40. It is very, very hard to do a business when you are small and no one knows you. You can’t pay an employee, so you do everything yourself. I worked very hard, no social life, no family life. It took two years to build customers.”

The birth of Arnold in 1977 didn’t slow Patti down; she simply brought him to work with her, placing the baby carrier at her feet by the cash register. Many customers recall the young boy roller-skating through the restaurant (he parlayed that skill into an accomplished career as a professional figure skater). Patti’s mother moved to Nashville in 1982 ( her recipe for steamed dumplings is still used). Anna, born in 1985, says eventually every one of her mother’s eight siblings did a stint at International Market. Anna and Arnold worked the cash register as soon as they were old enough to count, perched behind the counter on the stool that was Patti’s throne — all 4 feet, 11 inches of her.

Over the years, the daily offerings on the steam table expanded to nearly two dozen items, and those are still priced to sustain starving musicians and broke students. There is a “special order” menu for customers with more pocket money; regulars long asked Patti to “make me something.” Countless flu and cold sufferers have benefitted from her “Cure All Soup.” Miserable hangovers have been sweated out via her hot-and-sour soup.

In 1996, Patti and Win turned an old house they owned across the street into International House Restaurant. The idea was to attract the customers who grew up on 35-cent barbecue chicken on a stick to a more sophisticated full-service dining experience. There was some education involved. As photographer Stacey Irvin remembers, “The first time friends and I went to International House and ordered our meal, Patti came out from the kitchen and informed us our curries were in conflict.”

Like International Market before it, International House was a few steps ahead of the neighborhood. Patti closed it five years later. Her timing was better for the new concept she installed in the building in 2003, PM, which catered to young people living nearby and a more adventurous student body at Belmont. She also harbored an ulterior motive: to lure son Arnold back from New York City, where he was living after hanging up his skates and gliding into culinary school. “It worked!” says Arnold with a laugh. He helped her fine-tune the PM model, and in 2009 opened Cha Chah two doors down, which segued into BLVD in 2013.

Arnold and Anna fondly recall the unique properties of life embedded in the restaurant business. “The idea of ‘family dinner’ was alien to me,” says Anna, who works at her alma mater, University School of Nashville and has just begun pursuing an MBA at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management. “We ate dinner at the restaurant every night. We came there after school to do our homework and help out. When I got the grades she expected, she walked me across the street to Circle K to reward me with a cola slushie.”

Patti knew the value of a dollar. Literally, says Arnold.

“If we would ask for something that she thought was extravagant, she would always say, ‘Do you know how many egg rolls I have to sell to buy that?’ Egg rolls were a dollar in the restaurant. All of our birthday parties were at the restaurant.”

Anna laughs. “I had to talk her into letting me have my birthday party here this year during opening hours. She said OK, but only one side.”

The restaurant rarely closed, even on Christmas Day. “She would give everyone else the day off, and be there by herself with just one item, pad Thai,” Arnold recalls. “She would say, ‘Not everyone does Christmas, but everyone has to eat.’ ”

After many years of declining repeated offers from Belmont University, in August 2018 the Myints sold the International Market building and three adjacent properties for $6.5 million. “This was a family decision,” Anna says. “Discussion went on for at least a year, and there were a lot of no’s from each of us at various times.”

But with Win’s declining health and Patti’s wish to spend more time with him and at home, they signed the papers — on the condition that International Market would remain open until July 2019. No decision has been made on altering that timetable. When Arnold and Anna went to Woodlawn Funeral Home to make arrangements, they weren’t surprised to learn that Patti had already done it in advance.

For some time, Arnold and Patti talked about writing a cookbook of reflections and recipes from more than four decades of hospitality. Not long before his mother’s death, he created a pitch to offer to publishers. In the forward, he wrote this about the restaurant closing, words that are especially meaningful now. “It is a bittersweet time for my family, but the one thing that I’ve come to realize by the outpouring of messages from loyal patrons is that what my parents did was more than just make interesting food. They provided a place for growth and opportunity, molding a community and building a sentimental table that generations will hold with personal regard.”