Can’t keep them down
Photo: Contributed
In early October of 2016, in the dead of night, a masked man broke into the popular West Kelowna restaurant Thai Fusion and set it on fire.
Atsawin (Luke) Sumpantarat, who owns Thai Fusion along with his wife Atchara (Ess), says the fire was devastating, costing the couple more than $100,000.
The damage and lost revenue are bad, but the fire is just one more chapter of a horrifying saga that’s played out at Thai Fusion over the past two years.
Sumpantarat says the whole thing started in March of 2015, when someone damaged a bunch of the restaurant’s windows by slinging marbles at them.
He didn’t think much of it at the time, just assumed it was some punk kids, so he repaired the damage and moved on.
Then, in August of that same year, Sumpantarat got a call from the police. They were standing inside the restaurant, telling him the place had been “smashed up pretty bad.”
Every single window had been hit, the door was “completely gone” and, chillingly, absolutely nothing had been stolen. Someone, it appeared, was deliberately targeting their restaurant, trying to force them to close.
“That was where we were like, O.K. we have to get cameras,” Sumpantarat recalled.
But despite the surveillance Thai Fusion was targeted four more times over the next two years, in a series of escalating incidents that culminated in the October fire.
Sumpantarat has a friendly, open face and an optimistic tone in his voice, which seems like kind of a miracle considering the past two years.
He says one of the hardest things about enduring the constant vandalism is the fact that he’s almost certain he knows who’s doing it.
Things started out rocky at Thai Fusion, and for a long time their quality was inconsistent. But when Sumpantarat and Ess began running the operation themselves things improved dramatically.
That’s when the vandalism started.
But without any concrete proof Sumpantarat has no recourse against the person he believes is systematically trying to destroy his business.
For an entire month he even slept in one of the booths, hoping to catch the guy in the act. Instead all he got was a back injury.
So far, the police haven’t been much help either.
And although he’s had to borrow money just to keep afloat through multiple closures, he’s not planning on packing it in any time soon.
“We don’t want the people who are doing that to think this is easy and they can do it again. We want to be stubborn enough where they would have to leave, not us,” he says. “We can’t just give into bullies.”
He grew up in Thailand where, as the only white kid in his school, he was bullied constantly. In the early 2000s he came to Canada, and was delighted by how safe the country felt.
“I’ve lived in Canada long enough to know that people here aren’t like that, and that’s why I love it here,” he said.
Despite the multiple closures Thai Fusion remains the third best reviewed restaurant in West Kelowna on TripAdvisor, a testament to its quality and the hard work Sumpantarat and Ess put into the place.
Thai Fusion remains closed today, but Sumpantarat is planning on opening again in the next couple of weeks.
He says the rumours that they owe money to gangsters, or that he slept with someone’s wife, are the hardest to deal with, but the couple loves West Kelowna, and they’re not going to let anything force them out.
“I have to keep reminding myself: don’t worry what people think of you because whatever you do is the best you can do and you kind of live with that,” Sumpantarat says.
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