The Show Must Go On

Chef Haikal Johari suffered a near-fatal motorbike accident in 2015 that left him paralysed from the neck down. After four years of rehabilitation, he has not regained full mobility, but that has not stopped him from attaining and maintaining his Michelin star for Alma by Juan Amador since 2016. He shares his fight story with Destin Tay

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October 2015 was when Haikal Johari thought that life as he knew it was over. An avid outdoorsman who spent much of his spare time in the gym or dirt biking, Johari was working as the executive chef of Water Library Group in Bangkok, a key player in the F&B and hospitality scene, when he was involved in a head-on collision while making his way to a motorbike circuit on his Yamaha R1 motorcycle. The initial diagnosis by the doctors there was dire; Johari broke his neck, lost his ability to speak, and was expected to remain bedridden. He had a three percent chance of regaining movement in his body.

He was not going to take that lying down.

With support from his wife, Rafiqah Soh, Johari went through an arduous rehabilitation program. “It was a terrifying experience, to wake up in the night and realise that your body is not responding. I wanted so badly to go back to sleep and wake up to find myself back to where I was before my accident,” he shares. While it was mentally taxing for him to rely entirely on others to take care of him during the earlier months, Johari managed to regain some mobility after two years of working with therapists from the Society for the Physically Disabled. With some assistance, he is now capable of walking short distances and ascending flights of stairs, though he still has limited movement in his hands.

His disability never stopped the 42-year-old from being involved in the kitchen. The 22-year veteran was not going to let his F&B expertise go to waste. Pote Lee, the Thai owner of Water Library Group, asked Johari to take over the reins of Alma by Juan Amador, as executive chef Christophe Lerouy was slated to leave in May 2016. Despite being bedridden in a ward at National University Hospital at that time, Johari readily accepted and began conceptualising new menus for the restaurant.