MIDDLEWICH residents are soon to have a new dining option, with a Thai restaurant opening up at the old Kinderton Arms Hotel.

Kin Arai? Thai is getting ready to open its doors in December, following chance conversation in Uganda earlier this year.

Owners Julian Leese and his wife Pom first bought the property at auction in February 2015, and intended to turn it into a seven-bedroom house before the idea of a restaurant took hold.

Julian explained: “We have had a restaurant before in Wales, but we were living in England at the time so that didn’t really work out. That was many years ago and we never thought about whether we would go back into it or not.

“My wife is a chef and she has contacts in the ingredients industry. She is Thai, and was on a business trip in Uganda with her father.

“They were in a restaurant having a discussion about the food and the conversation came around to the quality of Thai food you get outside of Thailand.”

“This is the kind of thing that you often find in England, when they remove the key ingredients and replace it with something complete different that completely changes the food.

“With our contacts in the ingredients business we thought ‘if we did it we could get whatever ingredients we needed’.

“We can do it properly and do authentic Thai food, still using local meat and fish. It was kind of an off-the-cuff remark that became ‘we can do this’.”

Having previously lived in Holmes Chapel, the family now live in the Booth Lane property after buying it at auction, where they were approached to appear on BBC show Homes Under the Hammer.

Julian said: “We went on Homes Under the Hammer – we recorded it with Dion Dublin when he first started and we were planning to turn it into a house.

“They are keen to come back in December once we are open, so maybe he will be our first special guest!”