HOME FOOD, NOW HAUTE
Trust Filipinos to be subversive about food. Gourmet cuisine, according to the French, is of fine quality, artfully prepared, and served in an elaborate setting. While local fine-dining restaurants follow this standard, some Filipino chefs are elevating “lutong-bahay” to gourmet status.
Chef Sau del Rosario says most people automatically assume that “gourmet” is expensive—a fancy dish using exotic ingredients such as foie gras or caviar. But the executive chef of F1 Hotel asserts Filipino cuisine from basic ingredients can “definitely” be gourmet—and it doesn’t matter whether it’s presented in banana leaves, palayok, or porcelain. “Basta andun yung flavors—it boils down to taste,” he says, preferring “the freshest ingredients” above “imported items.”
What’s more important, del Rosario says, is that the chef has spent time and thought on the dish. “You put your heart and soul in it,” he says, likening a chef and his cooking to an artist with his masterpiece.
Margarita Fores, owner of Café Bola, Cibo, Lusso, and Grace Park, says that while she favors certain artisanal products from Italy, such as prosciutto di Parma or aceto balsamico, she also values indigenous ingredients—and that, in fact, “the biggest learnings come from being able to use things like balatong, and ubad, and ubod…everyday things for the people in the province.”
As far as Fores is concerned, there is no such thing as a lowly native ingredient. “It’s just as important, and just as amazing a thing to work with as a truffle, or a caviar, or the best parmigiano, or the best olive oil.”
Many European chefs are actually looking here for unique ingredients, Fores adds. A few indigenous edibles that Filipinos have forgotten, overlooked, or taken for granted, like wood sorrel and alugbati, are being used in the kitchens of two-Michelin star restaurants Noma and Mugaritz.
“We’ve gotten visits recently from the chefs of Noma, Mugaritz, even Heston Blumenthal [of three Michelin-starred The Fat Duck] passed by…it’s saying a lot about the Philippines and Filipino cuisine starting to be on the radar. Anthony Bourdain says our lechon is the best in the world. I think Downtown Café that’s remarkable,” says Fores.
What defines Filipinos, points out Claude Tayag of Bale Dutung, is home cooking: what he calls “soul food.” “In the generations of our parents and grandparents, it was made with love. Slow-cooked. No shortcuts,” he says.
Tayag, however, is hard-pressed to define the gourmet experience. “Is it the ambience that goes with it? Is it the leaner cuts of meat? Is it the proper setting? Is gourmet organic? I don’t think so. Basically it’s the time the effort and you put into cooking,” he says.
Traditional, peasant food is now served as a delicacy in luxe restaurants, he says with pride.
The Western world is only now “discovering” the snout-to-tail principle, which is practiced in Filipino cuisine. “It’s the cooks on the streets that utilize every part of the animal, not the rich people. The rich people just eat. They don’t invent. It’s the one who ‘makes do’ that creates anything,” says Tayag. “Pataas, hindi pababa.”
An excerpt from the composite feature and cover story, "Win the Food Fight," published in the August 2014 issue of Entrepreneur Philippines.