FILIPINO holidays are mostly about family and friends gathered around a dining table. And with the Christmas holidays just a few days away, I can’t help reminiscing about memorable dinners past and present.
My most rewarding dinners are those I prepare myself, especially when the grandkids come for a visit. This is when I relive the domestic cooking I grew up in Catanduanes, described in an old school hymn as “the pearl of the Eastern seas.”
Needless to say, my being an islander has made me partial to seafood. My ideal lunch or dinner fare consists of soup from boiled fresh tangingue with just garlic and tomatoes sauteed with kalamansi, broiled blue marlin, crabs simmered in coconut milk and one’s island version of laing with a lot of sili in it.
This chef’s routine begins the night before, when I get to bed early to make sure I am up at 4 a.m. to get a headstart on the choices of fresh fish on a Sunday morning at the Pasig market. I can find my way around fresh fish in any market. In fact, that’s where I usually head for in any new place I visit, after hunting out possible concert venues again, if only to relive the idyllic island existence of my youth.
Alas, my dining choices have drastically changed since I moved to the Big City. Fresh fish now cost a fortune and I have to make do with fish wrapped in flour or sautéed with ginger to cover up the fact that they weren’t caught yesterday.
The islander in me is still full of silent if polite disdain for hotel food. The so-called glorious cuisines in fancy restaurants still have difficulty settling on my palate. But since my job has something to do with media, dinners have assumed another function which is not merely to please your stomach but to fulfill social and/or media obligations.
Then and now, there are still lifestyle and movie press cons where I pretend to know middle to upper class dining habits while figuring out what to do with that endless array of silver and wishing the entire ritual would end pronto and I can be my real self again.
To this date, I have not made the mistake of passing myself off as a gourmet, although I must admit I am somehow getting the hang of gourmet food and have started warming up to some ‘strange’ cooking that are really interesting. And in between covering theater, cinema and music, I have ventured into covering food festivals.
The one mounted by this five-star hotel in Makati gave me a sense of déjà vu with all that crab simmered in coconut milk and those native desserts were the stuff I grew up with in the island.
Talk of Asian affinities in the realm of universal cooking.
Perhaps getting to be a gourmet is akin to evolving from listening to Pearly Shells and Noche Azul to enjoying Traviata and Manon Lescaut. Like outgrowing tuba from your island days and enjoying vintage wine.
But I guess being cosmopolitan in food and dining will never be part of my evolution. Years of hotel food in those press cons have only made me yearn for real food and drinks from the countryside. Hence I never miss invitations to go to the islands — any of the islands for that matter — if only for a whiff (or a bite) of island cooking.
In Baclayon, Bohol, the best treat is being considered part of the family by actor Cesar Montano. We all live in this modest house, have a quiet breakfast at eight, and in the late afternoon retreat to the nearby Baluarte port to swim and have beer (the actor only drinks wine) with broiled fish done right there at the edge of the pier. The big surprise is that his action star-brother Rommel is a good cook and a real pro in island cooking.
To this day, I relish how he’d do the broth for shells, the fish sinigang and his seaweed salad.
When the actor was invited to a wake once, I tagged along, and voila!, got to sip tuba again, that village drink fermented from coconut. I could never have enough of that tuba re-discovered in Bohol, so Montano had to occasionally remind Rommel and me to tone down our laughter because we were at a wake, not in a beer joint.
In Bacolod some years back, I joined the Madrigal Singers in an informal post-concert dinner in this place called Pala-Pala. At this seaside turo-turo, you choose the fish and crabs you like and have them cooked right there. It was sheer heaven to taste real fresh seafood in the province.
In Legazpi City, my favorite is the pinangat, a unique unbeatable version of the laing. It has also become a favorite of international pianist Cecile Licad that every time she comes to Manila, I tip a Licad fan in Tabaco, Albay to send frozen pinangat for his favorite pianist. The Bicol pinangat made it to Licad’s latest Noveleta, Cavite outreach concert and even the flutist-impresario Ray Sison loved it. When she came back for another concert, I again ordered pinangat all the way from Bicol and sent it to the house where the pianist was a guest. Come dinner time, the pianist excitedly asked for the pinangat. Strangely, the host pretended she did not hear. Licad gently asked again and was advised: the pinangat didn’t jibe with the evening dinner course of lamb chops. Out of courtesy, the pianist didn’t insist. We surmised the pinangat ended up with the household help or someone helped herself to it and couldn’t resist finishing it off before dinner came.
Through the years, I have come to realize that dinner isn’t just about food; it is also about the class divide. My celebrity friends get invited to them, and always, I don’t presume it follows that I am also invited. I once accompanied a brilliant Filipino tenor to a dinner where the architect host invited the artist and me after the CCP rehearsal. Before the dinner proper, someone in the architect’s inner circle said it’s not good to have a 13th visitor. That 13th visitor turned out to be me. I figured she (who was not the host, only another guest) counted all the guests and decided there was someone in the crowd she didn’t like and declared him the 13th visitor. Just to give her the delectation of pulling off a social coup, I pretended I left something at the CCP office, where I used to work, and had to leave. I never returned to that house (even if the host said it was pianist Gary Graffman that I would have lunch with for an interview).
In my lifetime, I have figured in only two kinds of dinner: one, dinner with real friends and real food with lots of laughter in between; and two, dinner to fulfill social obligations (meet the artists, meet the new ambassador, hear concert announcements, CD launching, dinner for a cause, mostly a litany of good causes of a foundation.
The first type of dinner happens all the time.
The late filmmaker Marilou Diaz-Abaya would say, “Pablo, I found you and Cecile a place where you can eat and laugh to your heart’s content.” Dinner with show biz friends is most memorable, too. Out there on JT Manukan Grille owned by Joel Torre, fans wanting autographs once interrupted my dinner with Pen Medina, Jonee Gamboa and Ronnie Lazaro. One of them managed to sit on Medina’s lap after getting an autograph and a kiss.
An exclusive lunch with Japan’s prima ballerina Yoko Morishita was another memorable dinner. With her lyricism, power and stage presence, she was no doubt the Cecile Licad of dance.
In my lifetime, I had the privilege of being served pre- and post-dinner San Mig light by Licad, Abaya, Montano and Morishita, not exactly in that order.
In the second type of dining, I manage excuses (I just metamorphosed from media person to caregiver, have a day out with my apo, I have a deadline, etc). Here, my laughter is reduced from fortissimo (loud) to pianissimo (almost like a whisper) as I ogle figures in the middle and upper class.
Most dinners in the cultural scene are planned as post-concert receptions. But when performances don’t turn out well, post-concert dinners can be a nightmare because you have to pretend you liked the performance while going through the ritual of greeting the artist. I remember a pre-dinner scenario of that disastrous night at the temple of the arts. The CCP head was smoking furiously (What happened? What happened? Why that cat-and-mouse chase between the soloist and the conductor?). That was one post-concert dinner that drinking beer in a Malate beer joint up to four in the morning (I initiated that concert).
But one dining embarrassment that I thought I deserved was the one hosted by a violinist and his pianist wife. In this lovely Iloilo home, I thought of the things I would miss since I couldn’t order them for dinner because of a house code which I respect. No wine and no beer, for one.
Just before the prayer before meals, which the good couple initiated, I settled on my seat, only to fall on my butt because of a defective leg support of a wicker chair.
It seemed Somebody was reminding me to refrain from ordering beer in a house purified by God, Brahms and Beethoven, strictly in that order.
(The first version of this article first came out in the Sunday Inquirer Magazine)