Fresh ingredients make all the difference in this CDO Thai restaurant
THE WARM climes of the Thai countryside are well matched by that of Southern city Cagayan de Oro’s normal sunshine (the intense rain of recent weeks is more of a fluke). The city’s first Thai restaurant, Thai Me Up, first opened in 2009, and made good use of the matching environment to provide food made with good, fresh produce.
Entrepreneur Jan Uy was a flight attendant with Philippine Airlines, but after the mass lay-off in 2008 he was forced to return to his home in Cagayan de Oro where his father ran a business providing styropor packs and takeout containers to hotels and restaurants around the city. The younger Uy promptly took over. It was during a trip to Cebu that he got the idea of opening a Thai restaurant, simply by having a taste of the South East Asian country’s cuisine. “This could work,” he said. At that time, he had been planning to operate a franchise thanks to the relative ease of operating a restaurant whose components were already laid out for him. He changed his mind.
Mr. Uy flew to Cagayan de Oro to visit the restaurant’s second home (the restaurant opened in 2009 and was closed to make room for this one), located in Cagayan de Oro’s Centrio Ayala Mall.
There’s no denying it: the readily available fresh seafood (Cagayan de Oro, after all, is a coastal city), the beef from the farms in nearby Iligan, and the city’s proximity to the vegetable and fruit growers of Bukidnon really does make a difference.
sipped on the (a coconut-seafood soup), and noted the firm freshness of the prawns, the fresh, inviting crispness of the vegetables, and the vibrancy of the spices, which Mr. Uy grows on his own farm about 45 minutes away from the city. The same freshness was well-