Wednesday, April 18, 2007 Grilling the night away By Leticia Suarez-Orendain
YOU plant yourself at one of the many benches in this famed little grill grove settled beside a private hospital.
Smoke gets in your eyes, so you can pretend your tears are not from a broken heart. Smoke permeates your skin, and clings to your clothes like amor seko, a kind of grass with barbed seeds. The distinctive aroma tells people wherever you go that you have been to Larsian (very near Chong Hua Hospital).
It is the grassroots hangout for yuppies and old timers with little budget and large appetite for simple food and good time while grilling each other about the question of life, art, movies, showbiz—or even the new girl.
The grill grove is in a new location, a few feet from its old address, but there’s nothing new about how barbecue vendors faithfully stoke the charcoal to life to cook your order, like pork, chicken (from head to foot, with the feet called adidas after a shoe brand name), and chicken intestines (called liston or shoelace, or even IUD in reference to its looped shape).
Eaten with Cebu’s innovation, the puso (rice boiled in woven coconut leaves; known also as hanging rice), it’s a cheap source of fast food even back when fast food was still little known in Cebu in the 1970s, the decade Larsian was born.
I miss the old Larsian, though, with its view to Cebu City’s “Central Park,” Fuente Osmeńa, and the incessant drone of traffic that was music to your thoughts of tomorrow.
The old Larsian had its own culture. There used to be carolers who demanded payment even if you didn’t want them in the first place, sampaguita vendors, and street children who begged for your food scraps. If these denizens are still around, for sure they were asleep the night I revisited my old haunting place. I didn’t find them.
These were the scenes that played with you as you nursed away the hours with your friends over bottles of beer or cola.
The new Larsian is still the alternative hangout for the “cash anemic” and a magnet even for the affluent of society. Fortunately, it is like the United Nations—still color blind to who you are in society.
It is Cebu in her plane self, and requires no uppity manners. You can overstay till the sky is light for the few bucks you dug from your pocket.
You can’t say you have been to Cebu until you have taken the first bite of Larsian’s grilled offerings, and its lure to linger till your bloodshot eyes see the early sun.
