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David Brown's Restaurant & Tea Terraces

Ye olde English house on Penang Hill

Mention strawberries in Malaysia, and one is likely to snap up images of Cameron Highlands with its rolling acres of orchards and plantations.

Many people may not know, however, the first ever place in the Malay peninsula to grow strawberries was on Penang Hill.

Long before the fruit was famously harvested in the cool climes of the Camerons, Captain Francis Light of the East India Company, who was known for his fondness for strawberries, had levelled a little hillock located on Penang Hill for planting in the early 18th century.

British settler David Brown, a nutmeg merchant, is said to have later obtained the land to build a tea house that would be called David Brown's Cottage.

Till today, the hillock is popularly known as Strawberry Hill.

Now, a couple of centuries after Light grew his first strawberries here, the historical appeal of this little "hill upon a hill" is being rekindled with a new restaurant specialising in traditional English cuisine and a dose of old colonial charm.

The David Brown's Restaurant and Tea Terraces on Strawberry Hill was conceived by Peter Lee, a jolly old veteran admirer of English cuisine and the best of British traditions.

"I love all things English," says a jovial Lee, immaculately dressed in a bright red bow-tie and a dandy straw hat when met at the restaurant. "Running an English restaurant is in my blood."

Lee, who owns a home in London for more than 30 years, has been known to call himself a "romantic" and "an unashamed dreamer" who relishes to bring back the old-world nostalgia of the British colonial period.

Significantly enough, Lee is the founder of the famous Smokehouse, a hotel and restaurant that has been a landmark in Cameron Highlands for more than thirty years now.

Very soon after he bought the Smokehouse building from a certain Colonel Forster in 1977, Lee helped develop its reputation as one of the grand old ladies among the lodging houses of the Camerons.

Standing on Strawberry Hill today, in front of a resplendent view of Penang Island's north-eastern cape with the inner city, the port and the serene Penang Channel in the distance, Lee now aspires to help rekindle the allure of this little hill's colonial history.

From the well-manicured garden of lily ponds and flowers to the spotlessly furnished interior, Lee maintains a meticulous eye for detail as his staff go about welcoming and servicing guests who turn up at the restaurant.

Lee stresses that his sense for keenness and exactness is derived from the very legacy of the British. "You must take regular care of a place like this," says Lee. "I am particularly meticulous about the food."

"In the old days the British knew how top be fussy. The way they laid their food and napkins, the way they cleaned their carriages. Everything was comfortable and punctual."

In his youth during the late 50s, Lee was a student of St Xavier's Institution, the institution founded by the La Salle missionary institution along Farquhar Street in George Town. He later spent some years at Raffles Institution in Singapore.

When the idea to have a new restaurant on Strawberry Hill came about, Lee was inspired that the building should take the shape of the old cottage that used to stand there.

Restoring David Brown's cottage

"We restored the look of David Brown's old cottage," Lee explains. "If you look at the old photos of the cottage, you can see that the shape of this new building is more or less the same as that of the old one."

He got conservation architect Laurence Loh to help bring back the authentic texture of the cottage on the hill with its ambience of an old British colonial garden.

It took ten months to plan and construct the new building. When completed in late 2006, the whole restoration had cost about
RM 3 million.

Lee handled the interior design by himself, carefully selecting the leather couches, the chimney and its mantelpiece, the china vases, the paintings on the walls, such that they reflected the calming, nostalgic atmosphere of the place.

"This sort of an effort cannot be treated as just something commercial," he stresses. "It needs a heart and a soul. It needs a personality. It needs some one in love with history with a passion."

Indeed, great pains were taken to maintain the natural environment of Strawberry Hill as part of the overall Penang Hill heritage.

Care was taken to keep the nature around the hill largely intact. ("I don't like roof lines higher than tree lines," Lee says.)

A towering shady tree, home to a troop of long-tailed macaques, was carefully left undamaged during the construction work, while a docile python has also been allowed to keep to itself in a remote corner of the little hill.

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