Mango Tree has amassed a loyal following in the two years it has been in the Philippines. Its secret is offering a healthy mix of the traditional and the modern along with a dose of good, old-fashioned Thai hospitality, Filipino style.
The first thing people notice is that the restaurant is modern, lacking any of the usual decor that marks the "usual" Thai restaurant. Modern interiors that focus on comfort and style reflect menu choices—dishes that have roots in Thai home cooking, but many of which have been updated for modern times, most of them recipes taken from the kitchen of the founders themselves.
Pitaya Phanphensophon, CEO of Coca Holding International Co. Ltd. is a second-generation restaurant owner. He started Mango Tree in Bangkok in 1994, later opening its first overseas location in London in 2001. “Growing up in a restaurant environment taught me how to please people, at least with hospitality, and obviously, we are a bit choosy and picky in food,” he says. “The first thing they taught me about the hospitality business is ‘you should give your customers the best value’ because we were taught that money is hard to make, hard to come by. When people spend, they want to make sure of its value.”
Pitaya, who is very active in menu development, takes great pains to say that he is not a chef. “I keep insisting on that because I think that chefs who have gone through proper training deserve recognition. It’s not like anyone who can cook well can call themselves a chef,” he explains. “I learned [how to cook] from my mother. My mother was a very good cook. She’s the eldest daughter and in the Chinese [household], she cooks for the family. She learned from my grandmother, that kind of thing. When you ask her for a recipe, she says, ‘A bit of this, a pinch of that,’ that’s how I learned how to cook.”
He takes great pride in Mango Tree’s menu, having tweaked the dishes to appeal to an international audience that is not afraid to spend for quality. “We always introduce what’s available locally…[In the Philippines], because you have good seafood, you have good beef, we introduced rock lobster to our menu. We listen to our customers, what they really want.
“We always start our Thai food a bit mild, entry-level. Having spicy food is like a drug addict. You have to go a bit, one notch up... We introduce different presentations, we introduce different plating, we introduce cuts of meat into our food. That makes us different from others, not to mention that we always use fresh ingredients. We never use frozen. We don’t cut corners.”
Mango Tree’s new menu items include their version of massaman curry, a Malaysian-influenced Thai dish that CNNGo listed as the number one in the article World’s 50 most delicious foods. “We introduced Massaman with short ribs and potato,” Pataya says. “If you look at it, there is no Thai dish with potatoes. That’s why when people ask me how authentic our Thai food is, I say, ‘We can’t claim that we are Thai a hundred years ago. We are modern, evolved.’”
The restaurant also plays with everyone’s favorite soup Tom Yum Gong, using locally available rock lobster in place of prawns.
Pitaya takes time to talk about how he draws on the soup’s history to create Mango Tree’s version, explaining that the soup originated as a dish for royalty, made with river prawns that gave the otherwise clear soup a bisque-like consistency. “As time passed, these dishes went from palaces to the countryside where you cannot find the prawns with big heads, so they added milk into it to thicken it,” he says. “This is why I keep on insisting that Tom Yum should have clear broth. That’s how we do it here, unless the customer requests otherwise.Obviously, rock lobster doesn’t have that kind of head, but it still gives you a different texture, a different experience.”
The Yam Pu Nim substitutes the catfish in the traditional catfish salad with crispy soft shell crab. “We decided to put it together to deliver something different in terms of texture and taste. They’re going through the elements, spicy with a bit of sour from the salad, but then you’ve got that bit of crispiness from the soft-shell crab,” Pitaya says. “For me, traveling the world and seeing different Thai restaurants, one thing I feel sets us apart is that we innovate this way—we’re always trying to introduce new things to our customers, and that comes primarily from [number] one, our passion. Number two, we have such a loyal following, we want to give them something else.”
Mango Tree’s forward thinking when it comes to Thai cuisine extends all the way to dessert. “You will see our dessert menu is not typical Thai desserts,” Pitaya says. “It’s obvious that traditional people would rather see Thai desserts on the plate, but our experience tells us that a lot of these Thai desserts are not palatable to many foreigners, so we introduced chocolates, panna cotta, cheesecake. I feel that desserts should be sweet to cleanse the palate. With Thai desserts, with sweet, you get salt, with savory, you get sugar, so you never know when your meal ends—that’s why we adopted European desserts. At least when customers leave, they may not be happy with everything—you can’t be happy with everything—but at least they remember that Mango Tree gave them something different.”
This mindset of innovation and modernization has obviously been successful, with Mango Tree growing to 40 branches in 9 countries, the latest branch opening in India. According to Pitaya, the secret to Mango Tree’s success is no secret at all. “The things that we do that bring us success is being honest to our customers and delivering on what we promise,” he says. “When they come here, they find that the food is different from other Thai restaurants that they have experienced. They come back.” — BM, GMA News
source: gmanetwork.com
