The Gullet: Dispatches on Philippine Food

THE GULLET

Dispatches on Philippine Food

Copyright to this digital edition © 2016 by

Clinton Palanca

Anvil Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved.

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ISBN 9786214201181 (e-book)

Book design by R. Jordan P. Santos

Illustrations by Lourdes Gordolan and Isabel Santos

Version 1.0.1

To my wife Lourdes, and my

children Lucy and William

Contents

Acknowledgments

I

The Invention

of Filipino

Food

Bite Me, I’m Brown and Oily

The Malolos Banquet

Spanish Food: Then and Now

The Chinaman in the Basement

What Is Local Food, Anyway?

II

The Life

of a Food

Writer

The Art of Criticism

The End of Fine Dining

Cooking a Local Feast

Some Notes on Ethical Eating

The End of Food

The Politics of Eating Out

The Guide to Guides: Michelin Guide versus World’s 50 Best

III

Travels

on My

Tummy

A Conversation with Pico Iyer

London Diaries

Essaouira, Morocco

Shanghai, China

San Francisco, USA

Hong Kong, China

Bo Innovation

Paris, France

Rajastan, India

North Train Through Asia

IV

Places and

People

The First and Finest

The Old Man and the Seafood

Isla Naburot, Guimaras

Lulu Casas Quezon

Hill Station, Baguio

Taste Memories of Shanghai

The Mid-Autumn Festival

Once I Had a Restaurant in Manila

David Thompson

V

Food and

Mortality

In the Beginning There Was Death

The Thinness of Air

Friendship in Middle Age

Photographs and Memory

A Last Word on Taste

Acknowledgments

MANY OF THE ESSAYS that make up this book have been previously published elsewhere. I would like to thank my editor at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Thelma S. San Juan, for her patience and firm hand with the editing pencil; my colleagues at Rogue for their ideas and comments; Kristine Fonacier and Sarge Lacuesta at Esquire (Philippines) for the chance to write longform articles; Michelle Ayuyao of Pepper.ph, Asia’s 50 Best, Bench, and Madrid Fusion Manila for giving me the impetus to write and allowing me to reprint work that was originally commissioned for them. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the culinary and gastronomic community in the Philippines for their grace and patience during my ongoing journey through Filipino food, about which I still know next to nothing compared with my colleagues. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family for suffering through many restaurants of varying quality with me on my weekly quest to find something newsworthy to write about.

Bite Me,

I’m Brown

and Oily

IT’S A QUESTION THAT COMES UP in casual conversation as much as in scholarly debate, in bewilderment, in frustration, in downright indignation: Why isn’t Filipino food more popular outside the Philippines? Why hasn’t it taken its place in the roster of world cuisines? There should be Filipino cookbooks alongside Thai and Vietnamese and Malaysian up on the bookshelves. There should be Filipino restaurants (real ones and not hole-in-the-wall migrant canteens) in cities all over the world. At least do us the token injustice of including bastardized versions of adobo and sinigang overleaf of pad thai and curry laksa in books like 30 Minute Microwave Meals.

But wait, what’s the problem? Why should it matter to us anyway? We know that our cuisine is the best in the world. Secure in this knowledge we can leave the rest of the world to wallow in ignorance. It’s their loss after all. But that would be like a tortured artist being content with his own genius: they never are. We need affirmation. We want Filipino food to be accepted and admired abroad because there’s so much of us in it, to the point that it becomes a stand-in for how much we are liked or respected abroad. Ultimately, there’s something very provincial and me-too about desperately wanting them—those white folk in them big cities—to notice us and give us attention.

And, up until recently, it seemed that they didn’t like, or at least didn’t care, about us very much. For instance, noted food anthropologist Penny Van Esterik, in her book Food Culture in Southeast Asia, simply omits the Philippines, without even a fumble of an excuse. In London, where I used to live, there was only one halfway-decent Filipino restaurant in the centre of town near Tottetnham Court Station. Paris used to have Nora Daza’s Aux Iles Philippines, a valiant attempt to make Filipino food conform to the template of a French main course (a plated dish of meat, vegetables, sauce) that managed to be almost, but not entirely unlike, the Philippine dish it was supposed to represent. The restaurant is long gone now, but it was a noteworthy effort to try and solve the problem that comes up when one is ladling out the dinuguan or kare-kare: Look at this! It’s all brown! How are we going to market this abroad? Our food though is so pangit. How can you make bilious green goat papaitan pretty?

Claude Tayag, an artist, chef and one of the leading minds in Philippine cuisine, rejects this idea that our food has been sidelined for its aesthetics: Our food is only as brown as we want it to be. And if you go to Bale Datung, his restaurant in Pampanga serves wildly inventive, imaginative and belly-busting Filipino food—beautifully presented without being mannered; and, indeed, it isn’t too brown. The late Bey Fernando, when he was running the Crescent Moon café in Antipolo, also had the knack of presenting Filipino food with relaxed, exuberant flair like the best Thai food. But by leaving out ugly Filipino food we’re consigning to the basement the best and most comforting aspects of our cuisine. O, gloop! How I love thee, gloop! There’s nothing like a cauldron of orange kare-kare, with large chunks of trembling, wobbly bits, spooned on top of hot rice, topped with bagoong, and then another big spoonful of saucy gloop for good measure. I like my arroz cubana (the Pinoy version, nothing to do with Cuba) mixed with rice, like dog food, the barely cooked egg yolks binding the whole mess together producing a lovely mushy sound. I think it’s silly to hide ugly Filipino food in a wrapper that’s as convincing as a bad toupée. Adobo en croûte, under a puff pastry layer, doesn’t make it less brown; and what does one do with the pastry? The very thought of balut soufflé makes my stomach churn. What is balut without seeing the little bones, with that attendant frisson of avian infanticide?

Besides, the gloopy brownness of curry hasn’t prevented it from dominating the takeout industry, especially in London, where you’ll see up to three in a row, with signs in the window claiming The Owner Eats Here, or a little more ominously, You Won’t Live to Regret Eating Here. So is it merely a question of marketing? Claude, for one, thinks that it’s one of the main factors: Ignorance by foreigners due to lack of information/marketing from our end. JJ Yulo, in a recent talk, prophesied: The wheels are in motion for our cuisine to finally hit the big time. Yes, I will go out on a limb and say that adobo will be as famous as Angelina Jolie. But Amy Besa thinks that the revolution has already happened, and though both believe in its breakthrough, Filipino food, Amy insists, is already out there and no longer invisible.

She has good reason to say this. It was the adobo recipe from her restaurant Purple Yam—which she runs with her husband, Romy Dorotan, in Brooklyn that was featured in the New York Times. Their book, Memories of Philippine Kitchens, part anthropological survey, part personal memoir, part recipe book, was featured in Vanity Fair. When I interviewed her for this article she pointed out that the premise of the question was problematic in the first place. People keep using the wrong concept of ‘popular food’ comparing it to Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, etc. and expecting it to be exactly where it is and in the same exact spot in people’s psyche… I think that is a wrong premise and is logically flawed. The question that naturally follows: So what then? is perhaps best answered by looking at the kinds of food served at Purple Yam (formerly Cendrillon in Soho): It’s Filipino but not bound by conventional ideas of authenticity. Romy is one of the most inventive chefs I know; and with the tools of a restaurant kitchen and the availability of ingredients in New York, he is able to riff effortlessly and produce what Amy describes as pan-Asian cuisine. Memories of Philippine Kitchens has been compared with the work of Claudia Roden, whose cookbooks—also anthropological recipes collections—introduced the British to Middle Eastern food.

Many Filipinos who go to Purple Yam, though, are disappointed that it isn’t proper or authentic Filipino food, an accusation that has Amy bristling. The people who are screaming we aren’t authentic are the ones who are most ignorant about their cuisine. They accuse us of not being authentic because we put coconut milk in our adobo. Haven’t they heard of adobo sa gata? In Tarlac, Tarlac (my father’s hometown), I was shocked to find out that they put gata in their pancit luglug. Now should we scream and yell at the Tarlaceños that they are not authentic?

Authenticity tends to be a fixation of Filipinos living abroad, either for themselves or for a foreign audience. Cooking with substituted ingredients and adapted techniques, or burdened with the responsibility of representing real Filipino food when foreigners come over for dinner, they tend to obsess on whether it is faithful to the original. Filipinos living and cooking in the Philippines are less obsessed with authenticity. In fact, they are constantly looking outwards to food trends in Asia, celebrity chefs in America, Michelin-starred restaurants in Europe, and seeing how the flavours, methods and ingredients can be incorporated in Philippine kitchens, whether at a restaurant or in a domestic scene. People go to Hong Kong, eat at the fantastic restaurants, and demand that the Chinese restaurants in Manila keep up with the modern Chinese food trends. After returning from New York and having eaten at Peter Luger’s, you can get something very, very close to their dishes at Mamou in Serendra, down to the upturned plate the oval serving-dish rests on. To paraphrase Richard Wilk: The Philippines may have never had, nor will ever have, a national cuisine; but they have always had an international cuisine. We’ve always looked outwards. What we’re upset about is that the outside isn’t looking back at us.

And what about modern innovations? Even sous-vide cookery (immersing vacuum-sealed ingredients in a low-heat water bath to cook for a long time) is beginning to make an appearance, as well as various other tricks from what used to be called molecular gastronomy but which its practitioners now insist on being called modernist cuisine. How far can we push traditional recipes before someone cries foul? Some Filipino cookbook writers insist that for bibingka to be authentic, it has to be cooked using a pan of hot charcoal. If we can get similar results with a good oven, must we continue to pretend the technology doesn’t exist and continue with an archaic gubat style of cooking? It’s a fallacy to say the older, slower ways are better. Often those who look to the past with nostalgia-tinted spectacles are wrong; sometimes they’re not. And speaking of innovation, what could be more Filipino than Jollibee’s sweet spaghetti with fried chicken, none of which are to be found beside the lissome labanderas in an Amorsolo painting? But surely the world is richer for it; definitely, I am fatter for it.

There used to be a time when the only kind of self-consciously Filipino restaurant one could open in the Philippines was the Barrio Fiesta–type, festooned with wicker, clay pots and rampant nativism, because one didn’t go out to eat food one could eat at home. This has all changed now; there are sophisticated restaurants in trendy places with trendy people eating Filipino food: Pia y Damaso in Greenbelt 5, Abe and Mamou in Serendra, Chef Laudico’s Bistro Filipino in Bonifacio Global City, and Jordy Navarra’s Toyo Eatery. Even restaurants such as the now-defunct The Goose Station, with its vaguely Francophile proclivities, features Filipino ingredients in innovative guises (with varying degrees of success). Even Margarita Fores, more known for edgy Italian dining, can be dashingly imaginative with Filipino cuisine in her catering, with ideas adapted from her constant travels. No one cries foul or accuses these restaurants of inauthenticity or bastardizing the national cuisine, because one can always pop out next door to a Gerry’s Grill or a Dencio’s, or my favorite Filipino restaurant of the moment, Café Juanita, where the