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We’re all Crying Tigers at Growler HQ today: Supatra’s Thai Cuisine will be ending its 15-year run on West 7th Street on Saturday, December 28.

A sign posted at Supatra this morning reads:

“We have accepted an offer to sell our business and we want to express our gratitude for the support we have received over the past 15 years! Looking ahead to the future, we plan to offer Thai Cooking Classes and other special events in the Summer of 2020. Supatra will be available to be hired as a Private Chef later in 2020 as well.”

Chef and co-owner Supatra Johnson started cooking in her native northeastern Thailand. After coming to America in 1989, she opened The Jasmine Market, an Asian grocery in Burnsville, where she taught popular Thai cooking classes. She published “Crying Tiger: Thai Recipes from the Heart” in 2004, the same year she opened her restaurant—first in Lowertown St. Paul, and shortly thereafter moving to West 7th Street.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this magazine has been fueled by Supatra’s Pad Kee Mao and Green Curry since our founding in 2012. The restaurant’s annual month-long winter vacation always made the bleakest season even more difficult, but once they’d reopen, the first taste of their khao soy noodles became a reliable harbinger of spring.

Today, we stopped in for our standard noontime order: Lunch Special #8 (spicy noodles) with pork, medium-spice (with a little cup of chili oil on the side), and vegetarian egg rolls. Readers, it was divine.

Supatra’s will be closed on Christmas Eve and Day before three final days of service.