The End of Thaipan

Last Sunday, Rebecca & I decided to walk over to the nearby Mandarin Gardens condominium to eat at the restaurant ‘Thaipan’. It’s very reasonably priced, air-conditioned & the ambience is quiet. We stumbled upon this place early last year & even invite a few people there for a meal.

Sadly, the quality of food & service dropped drastically over the later part of last year, so we hardly went there to eat for the past 6 months or more. Last Sunday evening, we decided to try the food there again.

Strangely, we had this odd feeling that we weren’t sure if it was still open, coz we haven’t visited that restaurant in a long time. So I called the phone number while walking there. Nobody picked up the phone, but we decided to just walk over to check it out, since it was just across the road from my house.

When we reached there, we got a shock of our lives! Thaipan had closed down! There were no lights on (its Sunday evening & it’s usually open) & the furniture was all still in place. Rebecca & I tried to peer through the glass door to see if it’s really closed down or maybe temporarily closed for renovation.

Suddenly Rebecca looked down & noticed that there was a huge spread of bills sprawled all over the inside of the entrance! I got a shock of my life coz I have never seen so many bills being slipped under the gap underneath the entrance! That confirmed that it was the end of Thaipan. The business is over… In fact, from the spread of bills on the floor, we wondered how long has this restaurant being closed down. Hmm…

As we walked back to East Coast Road to settle for KFC (both of us recently renewed our craving for the original chicken flavor), we were discussing about how much vision the owner Paul had for his restaurant business, which he co-owned with his fellow NTU Engineering graduate, Kenneth Lo.

Both were professional in serving customers, with Paul being the more outspoken one who would open & close the door for his customers, as well as occasionally sharing his vision for his business with them! In fact, one of the customers whom he shared his vision was with Rebecca’s Dad, when she brought her family there to eat last year. It’s just too bad that the business ended up closed down.

It sure was a scary amount of bills sprawled out all over the floor…