langkawi magazine
To Do SECTION
Dinning in the Mangrove
`Location, location, location,` the agents tells you is it he key whether you're buying or opening a restaurant. Big food chains survey sites for weeks on end while even a hawker food seller worth his salt will do a recce for his roadside stall.
So what chance has a restaurant located miles from anywhere and deep in the middle mangrove swamp?. Barn Thai Langkawi is a roaring success but it did not have a few ages that outweighed the seemingly impossible odds. Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad was the one. The Prime Minister is eager to promote his favourite island, preserve the wetlands and to throw down a challenge, had just returned from Turkey where he had been very impressed by a restaurant in the marshes there. The upshot was that Barn Thai, whose restaurant in KL had ~ become a bit of an institution, ended up with the task of making it happen. But there were two catches - they could not use bulldozers and had to do it before the 1993 LIMA, a mere 56 days away.
Of course, they did it and Restaurant Impossible was officially opened by Mahathir on December 6. The rest is local tourism history as it has become THE place to eat for tourists on the island. Not the most convenient of spots, it is about 15 minutes out of Kuah but a bit hard to find if you try to cut across the main island. Not that that worries most of the visitors who are bussed in by the restaurant itself or the local hotels.
If you don't have an appetite when you reach the car park, you will by the time you sit down. A wooden walkway 450m long leads you to the restaurant and at times it seems that you are never getting there, there's plenty to look at en route.
The mangrove swamp below is teeming with life and even if most of it stays hidden, few guests make it to their table without seeing something to write home about. Monkeys, monitor lizards, flying foxes, mud skippers and all manner of birds from herons to hornbills have been seen along the way.
The walk is memorable enough and builds up a nice sense of anticipation, riot to mention appetite, by the time you reach the Kampung style establishment itself. And whatever high culinary hopes you may have had on the way, you're not going to be disappointed. The Thai food is superb as is the atmosphere with the high ceilings, curios on the walls, and variety on the menu. And for a place that really has you in its grasp, the prices are reasonable too.
On the face of it, a more inhospitable environment and less suitable place to be at dinner time are hard to imagine than a mangrove swamp. But in Langkawi it is THE place to eat.
Langkawi 4/4/1999
