Where Thai Meets Tennessee: Arnold Myint’s Vision for International Market 2.0

Article by Matt Kirouac | Photos by Nathan York & Matt Kirouac | Published November 14, 2025

For queer people, living authentically might mean leaving home to find your own way or chasing Hollywood dreams. It might mean adapting to resources or an environment in ways that feel right. For chef Arnold Myint, all are true — and all paved the way for a homecoming on his own terms. 

A Nashville native with Thai and Burmese parents, Myint left to travel the world and chase dreams, finding his voice as a creator — and as an advocate for change in a traditionally heteronormative restaurant industry — before returning home to pick up the mantle. Today, across the street from his late parents’ beloved Thai restaurant, International Market, Myint is continuing the family legacy at International Market 2.0, a reinvention that blends memory with his own vision.

“Everybody has a story of being fed by Ms. Myint, she was like a mother to the city,” the chef recalls of his mother, Patti Myint, who established their restaurant in Germantown in 1975. Popular with local students and musicians, International Market’s original iteration was a grocery store featuring Asian products and a steam table, Khao Gang, laden with rice and meats. After his parents passed away in 2018, International Market closed in 2019, and the site was turned into a performing arts center for Belmont University. But Myint and his sister Anna didn’t want to let their parents’ legacy fade. “Belmont Boulevard was always my home, I grew up there,” he recalls. “My grandmother lived there, I lived down the street. It’s always been our neighborhood.”

A member of the LGBTQ+ community, Myint describes leaving to find himself, becoming a competitive figure skater, and touring the world performing for the likes of Royal Caribbean and Disney on Ice. “I wasn’t always destined to be back in Nashville, I don’t think,” Myint muses. “I ran hard, like every queer kid in the world. I tried to find my voice and go off and do my thing.” 

That included New York City, to leverage his skating skills into a Broadway career, where he “fell into” culinary school at the Institute of Culinary Education, as an excuse to stay in New York. “I could still party and do whatever I wanted in New York, but when I was in school, I fell in love with cooking.” Citing his figure skating background, Myint competed for scholarships and reality shows. “I was competing on reality shows because of the marketing aspect,” he says, describing his appearances on Top Chef as free public relations for the family restaurant back in Nashville. Eventually, Myint found himself in Los Angeles, in pursuit of Hollywood. “I did Top Chef and went on Food Network Star,” he says. “It catapulted me into California, and living out my Hollywood dreams.” When his culinary alma mater opened an L.A. campus, he taught classes. It was around this time that his mother passed away, followed by his father that same year. After International Market closed in 2019, Myint was at a crossroads. 

“My sister wanted me to come back to Nashville and keep the restaurant going,” Myint explains. “When Anna persuaded me to move back to Nashville, I said, ‘You want me to reopen a restaurant in a city that crushed me?’” he recounts. “She goes, ‘you need to come back and check it out, you can do what you want to do here.’” In his time away, Nashville evolved, too. “It was very meat-and-three,” he says of the Nashville he knew. “Polenta fries was a hot item, and hot bacon salad dressing was the sexiest thing in the world. The palate is different now.” 

That evolution gave him the freedom to put his own mark on International Market 2.0. “It made it easier for me to continue doing what I’ve always done,” Myint shares. “I told my sister, ‘I’ll stay if it can evolve, and if I can put my stamp on the restaurant.’” For him, reviving the restaurant — in a space across the street from the original — meant honoring his mother, while making it his own. Today, Myint features lunch specials and a vaster collection of dinner dishes. His menu is more scaled-down than his mother’s, focusing on dishes he knows well, inciting some growing pains from regulars, accustomed to his mother’s something-for-everyone approach. “I’m not my mom,” he reiterates. “Some things are memories or a time stamp, but I know what I can do well for you. We’re feeding the community in a way we know we can contribute in terms of quality.” 

He describes his food as a globe-trotting picnic, combining Thai influences with his upbringing in a Southern city, with dishes like watermelon salad with anchovy-fried shrimp-chili crumble, and five-spice-marinated Thai fried chicken served with sticky rice, cucumber salad, and chili sauce. “It’s a culmination of my roots and my voice and my growth, as a little Asian gay boy growing up in Tennessee,” says Myint, referring to his menus as homage to his mother’s classics, while digging deeper in terms of flavors and ingredients. His cooking earned him a semifinalist nod for Best Chef: Southeast from the James Beard Foundation in 2024, and a new cookbook, Family Thai: Bringing the Flavors of Thailand Home, inspired by family recipes. “It’s a gift back to Nashville,” he says of the book, an expanded adaptationof a self-published cookbook his mother made in the ‘80s, for customers who loved her food — and now his. 

In the book, on his menus, and outside of the kitchen, Myint negotiates what authenticity means to him as a chef, as a second-generation Asian-American, and as a queer person. “What I do in my walls is authentic to my upbringing, and to me,” he says, decrying stereotypes about Thai restaurants with hundreds of menu items at all times. “My Thai voice is what my accessibility was growing up in Tennessee. I use things that I can find within my region and my season. We’re the authority of our food, and our food’s story, and as long as we stick to that philosophy, no one can correct what we set out to share as creators.” 

That sense of pride applies just as strongly to his drag persona, Suzy Wong. Recalling his love for pageantry and glamor from an early age, figure skating became an early outlet. “I loved the design, the music, the culture, the rhinestones,” Myint says, remembering annual family trips to Thailand, where they went to Vegas-style ladyboy shows. “That was the vision and glamor that I gravitated to.” When he had the opportunity to create a character for himself, Myint had a restaurant in Nashville called Suzy Wong’s House of Yum. And for Halloween one year, he came out as Suzy Wong to perform. “I missed skating, so I rediscovered my life on stage. I just traded skates for heels.”

While running a restaurant and being a father keep him busy, he performs as Suzy Wong whenever he gets the chance — and whenever there’s an itch for competition. “The grandeur has always been in me,” he notes. “Dragging for dollar bills has never been my M.O., but if there’s an opportunity to compete, I love that.” He curates big-production shows when the budget is right, including a two-hour show for Telluride Gay Ski Week, opting to use earnings for fundraising. “It’s a creative hobby of mine,” he adds. “It feeds my creativity, and feeds my soul more than anything.” 

Whether it’s in skates, chef shoes, or heels, he’s flipping the script in a historically heteronormative industry. “Recently, there’s been more liberation in terms of operating beyond that male-dominated kitchen,” Myint says. “It’s important for me, and I’m glad to be a part of that change, and an early representative voice of it.” For him, the proof is in the work. “One of the articles that came out when I was on Top Chef was about ‘will this drag queen be on top?’” he says. “I fell into this stigma of always getting cast as this token gay boy. I tried hard to shift that stigma of me, and cook really hard, but I know I cook really well.” Cooking hard, he says, helps people see beyond tropes. “Undeniably, passion and good food can’t be argued,” he adds. “I’m still head down, I cook hard, and hopefully people can see beyond who I identify as.” 

For Myint, finding his voice meant discovering a love for cooking on his own. It meant chasing dreams, be it in the kitchen or on the stage, shimmering in rhinestones. It meant seeing differences as strengths, returning to a home he once knew, reconnecting with his family’s restaurant roots, and making it his own.