05.17.08

Food, Glorious Food!

Posted in Magazines at 11:51 pm by Greg

Big Chilli Magazine, May 2008

After living in Thailand for a while, eating the cheap and delicious food that can be found on every street corner and under every umbrella, it’s easy to lose touch of what constitutes really good western food. After a few dozen meals in most Thai restaurants, a piece of meat that’s 1/8^th of an inch thick and labeled a ‘steak’ starts to sound totally logical. And don’t even get me started on the ‘American Breakfast’.

But, much like Serpico fighting to keep honor amid a less-than-stellar surroundings, one man in Thailand is working to keep really good western food available to all. Bob Coombes has been running Choice Foods for nearly 40 years, offering up high-quality meat and deli food to restaurants (and average Joe Somchai’s) who appreciate that a real steak should be thick, tender and full of flavor.

I sat down with him in his office to discuss how a British expat living in Australia decided to move to Thailand to manage investments but ended up selling meat to some of the best restaurants and hotels in the country.

“Bangkok was much smaller then,” says Coombes through his bushy white beard. “I was doing okay selling investments, but then Australia changed their laws and suddenly you weren’t allowed to mess with foreign investments. So I sat around a bit and thought about things and decided to do a survey of hotels. There were only a few in those days - the Oriental, the Narai, the Erawan, the President… and the Dusit Thani was just being built. After I was done poking around a bit, I said ‘this has the makings of a food business’, and that’s how I started.”

Not one to get held up by the fact he didn’t know anything about the meat business, Coombes jumped right in. “I just started going around to all the hotel GMs and said ‘I’m the meat man,’ which seemed to work. There was no great fuss with regulations or licenses back then - I didn’t know what I was doing, but I learned pretty fast.”

Once he was up and running with the then-limited list of meat-buying clients in town, he wanted to keep growing. “I thought ‘who uses more meat than a steakhouse?’ so I opened up The Beefeater, now called the Barbican on soi Thaniya.” Coombes was working with limited space, so he came up with the unique ‘three-floors-in-two design still in use at the Silom landmark. “That worked out quite well actually, I don’t know why more places don’t do that,” he muses.

As Thailand’s tourism industry grew, so did Choice Foods’ clients. Expansion into Phuket and Pattaya followed, as did the technology needed to ensure his product stayed at its peak. “We had the first refrigeration trucks in Thailand that weren’t used for ice cream,” he says. “I had to build them here, because nothing they had was suitable.”

In fact, there were a lot of firsts. “We started with imported beef and oysters, which were hard to find here, and then salmon, trout, lamb, cheese… you name it. We were the first ones to bring French fries in from Idaho, and beef from nearly every country that produced meat of high-enough quality.” But even after all that, he still has a soft spot for Australian beef. “When you consider quality, price, consistency, access… you can’t beat it.”

One of his first big successes was with what was then a rare delicacy - Canadian salmon. “People loved it, because it was pretty exclusive then. One year I smoked 100 tons of it, and sent that all over the place - Hong Kong, Malaysia, the UK.” Then he adds, “but these days, ugh… it’s all farmed and the quality is very ordinary. It’s not bright pink like it used to be, more of an off-yellow. I wouldn’t feed it to a cat,” he says laughing.

Coombes takes great pride in the quality and honesty with which he operates, always a nice trait to stumble upon in Thailand. He once owned a 250sqm restaurant at Don Muang Airport called The Cockpit, which often saw customers come from southern Bangkok just to stock up on their famous sandwiches, but eventually saw his lease fail to get renewed because of his refusal to, how to say it…‘tip the owners’.

“We don’t deal with hotels or restaurants who operate like that,” he says. “It only serves to drop the quality for everyone involved.” It’s a good sign then, that all of the major hotels in town buy product from him, with Sirocco being his single biggest client.

“We’re looked at as the people who set the standard for quality, frankly speaking. Some people say ‘we can get it cheaper than what you sell it for,’ which is fine, it’s the same in any business. But our competitors can’t match our quality or service,” he says matter-of-factly. “It’s because over the years, I’ve built a list of contacts which is second to none, and have a reputation for being honest and paying my bills on time. The idea of telling lies is anathema to me - telling the truth is just easier.”

Usually, to stay relevant in the notoriously finicky food business for so long, you have to know what’s just around the corner, but it’s not always so. I ask Coombes how he remains a hip young kid in such a dynamic business, to which he answers, “I get my timing wrong. Twenty years ago I thought steakhouses would boom, but they didn’t. However, now they’re quite popular, which is good for me,” he says as he laughs his low, slow laugh.

So what’s the next big thing going to be?

“I’m backing my shares on Mediterranean cuisine… not so much Italian, because I think it’s slightly overdone here, but tapas will continue to grow.” He explains to me the rather silly origins of the trend, where you essentially snack until you’re full. “Tapa means ‘top’ in Spanish, and it started out as a cover on a drink to keep the flies out,” he explains. “Someone figured out that if you put a piece of food on that cover, you could charge people for it. The portions are small but the variety is endless.” In fact, he believes so strongly that the trend will boom that he’s flying six Thai chefs over to Barcelona for a food fair to expose them to the cuisine. If anyone’s going to be ready to ride the wave, it’ll be Coombes.

As Bangkok climbs the social ladder of cities around the world, it’s becoming much more cosmopolitan, which bodes well for people offering unique meals. “Thai people these days are much more aware than they were only a short time ago,” says Coombes slowly. “They’re better traveled and have a much greater exposure to the world, so what they’d accept five years ago, they won’t accept now. They want better quality and they’re willing to pay for it.”

As I wrap the interview up, I notice something strange - Coombes doesn’t have a computer on his desk, but he does keep an old beige model with an aging CRT monitor in the corner - he’s clearly not worried about internet gossip or updating his facebook page - he’s all business. I point out that it’s a bit strange, then, that an iPhone sits on his desk. “Oh, this thing?” he says picking it up dismissively. “I don’t even know how to use it, I only bought it because my old phone broke - I had that one for 8 years.”

As he walks me to the door, I ask how stiff the competition is. “I was the third wholesaler to start in Bangkok, but now there are over 40, although the first two are gone now. Many other companies see the business as just a bunch of numbers, but don’t know anything about what’s behind it - how the meat was produced, how many years it takes to develop a strain of cattle, what you shouldn’t do with processing, how and where and when to use the meat, those kind of things. For them, it might as well be ball bearings, just a number on a page. But we offer more than that.”

As a test, I stop by his retail shop located on Sukhumvit 71, just out front of his office, and pick up a juicy steak and a half-loaf of bread. Despite being blitzed by my legendary talent to ruin any meal, the steak remains juicy and tender, with the dense bread sopping up the leftover sauce quite nicely. Anything that can stand up to my cooking certainly has something going for it.

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