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By Benjamin Malcolm
With this mantra of karmic success and a strong creative flair,
Walailak has done all that and more, parlaying her Dalaabaa Bar
and Restaurant into one of the hottest tables in Chiang Mai, a trendy
restaurant serving up cutting-edge Thai cuisine in eclectic, attention-grabbing
surroundings.
Her signature touch is everywhere about the restaurant, from the
d?cor to the music, from the food to the gigantic flower bowl that
sits like a bright star in the middle of the room around which guests
seemingly twirl on their way to their tables.
First and foremost, there is the overall ambience; Dalaabaa mixes
what feels architecturally at times like the 1960's with all the
modern comforts of home. It is a place to relax amidst the up-and-coming
of Chiang Mai. Rooms and an outside patio are stuffed with comfortable
couches and sofas, magazines are there for the perusing off bookshelves
and soft jazz music flows from the surrounding speaker system. It
could almost be home, but for the addition of stylishly black-and-red
clad waiters and waitresses coming to serve you and the babble of
myriad conversations and laughter.
Secondly, there are the aforementioned flowers and eclectic yet
compatible sense of colour and interior decoration (red and black
mix throughout for the restaurant's general colour scheme). Walailak
has some background in this, as she also owns a flower shop and
silk business in the Sukhumvit area of Bangkok.
Last but not least, there is the name, Dalaabaa. The name usually
appears in lower case red and white letters on signs and post cards,
the white tops of the d, l and b ranging far above the other letters.
"Dalaa is from the flower," explained Walailak over appetizers
and cocktails one early evening. "I wanted to have my own unique
name. I did the spelling and design myself. The logo is like a musical
note, to make you feel comfortable when you come here. Five A's
is also like five stars."
She says the last bit with a laugh, but she doesn't need to be
modest about her evident success. Dalaabaa is hitting the right
notes with patrons, most of whom seem to arrive for late, leisurely
dinners on the particular night we visited. Dalaabaa will celebrate
its one-year anniversary in November and can already boast of being
the site of one significant local event - the wedding of Joe Cummings
(the well-travelled Lonely Planet travel book author and freelance
writer).
There are three pieces that fit together seamlessly to give Dalaabaa
its deserved reputation, according to Walailak - its atmosphere,
the food and the service and the former is probably the most important.
Chiang Mai is glutted with restaurants with excellent food, but
many of these same places fall short on atmosphere.
You can sense this as you head up to Dalaabaa from the parking
lot. Walking up a lamp-lit stone staircase, you approach a gate
and are greeted by a seeming moat of water that separates you from
the restaurant. Leading across, like little islands, are stepping
stones, which you can walk across. For the less adventurous, there
is also a walkway around. Both of these will eventually take you
to the bar and the entrance of the restaurant.
The point of all this, according to Walailak, is to get people
to slow down on the way to the restaurant (something she's had to
learn to do more of in the transition from Bangkok to Chiang Mai).
It also serves as a pretty neat dividing line between the otherworldly
comfort zone of the restaurant and the bustling world of Chiang
Mai outside.
Once inside, there are several levels to the restaurant, from the
upper floor bar area (which all must enter through) to the air-conditioned
main room and patio area that surrounds the main room. One can see
and be seen in all areas of the restaurant.
The menu is an ever-changing Central and Northern Thai-inspired
range of treats. On the night we visited, the house specialties
included crispy crab sticks and shrimps wrapped in salmon (a "dalaabite")
for appetizers and for the main course, fresh salmon mixed with
fruit salad, fried salmon with lamyai, fried fish with ginger, fried
Tuptim fish with lemongrass and peanut salad (sliced conveniently
into bite-sized pieces) and spicy chilli pepper fried rice. All
were delicious and showed the talent of the kitchen, taking the
fresh ingredients of Thai-style as a base and adding foreign elements
for a special creative touch.
The cold season, at the end of the year, will likely bring more
treats, including an outside grille and live music. The former was
inspired by the owner's trip to Frankfurt, Germany, where she witnessed
both outside grilles and beer gardens. Walailak prefers to do most
of her travelling through magazines. The restaurant and her other
businesses keep her busy enough.
Walailak is bubbling over with energy and creative ideas on the
night we visit and we enjoy a few hours of her company before departing
into the city, much impressed with our visit to the excellent venue
of Dalaabaa.
"My restaurant is quite different from others. I'm not doing
it for everybody," she said. "Sometimes guests say that
they can go to the fresh market and buy the sticky rice with the
grilled pork and they pay 10 Baht, but this is 100 Baht. It's up
to you. I'm not doing it for everybody; I'm doing it for people
who know what I'm giving to them."
Giving? Dalaabaa Bar & Restaurant is doing that every day.
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