Saturday, January 05, 2008 Simple and hearty By Jigs Arquiza
CARINDERIAS are probably the most popular eating places in the Philippines.
Usually found in small neighborhoods, they offer inexpensive food to couples or small families who find it impractical to cook for just two or three people, or to those who don’t have that much time to prepare meals.
At the end of Mariano Cui St., a stone’s throw away from the Provincial Capitol, lies a carinderia that’s like no other. Like most carinderias, the interiors are Spartan, almost utilitarian, but that’s where the similarity ends.
It serves only a handful of dishes, notably, steak, chicken and salad, with a few sidings and dessert thrown into the selection. Imagine that.
Named after the method of taking out the backbone of a chicken and spreading out the two sides to flatten it, Spatchcock Chicken and Steak House offers Cebuanos a whole new way of eating chicken. The flattened chicken, or spatch-cock, is put on a charcoal-fired grill and is basted with special Spatchcock barbecue sauce. During cooking, a stainless-steel basin covers the spatch-cock, with further basting at certain intervals.
This is done for additional flavor and to keep the bird moist. The basin acts as a convection oven, keeping the hot air circulating around the bird, resulting in a faster cooking time and giving a more evenly cooked piece of poultry. It also helps keep the moisture from evaporating too quickly, preserving the natural juices of the chicken.
Cebuanos who are fond of lechon manok, chicken barbecue and other grilled food will definitely find Spatchcock’s chicken very interesting, to say the least. They’re cooked upon order of the customer, so there’s no pre-cooked, heavily burnt and badly charred chicken or heaven forbid, reheated chicken unsold from the previous day.
There’s very little (or none at all) charring, and the meat is very tender and juicy. The barbecue sauce is a cross between the North American style barbecue sauce and the typical Pinoy barbecue sauce: it’s sweet, with a slightly smoky aftertaste.
Steaks at Spatchcock are typical of the way Cebuanos love their steak: big, cheap and bred from Angus stock. Half-inch thick rib-eye steaks and inch-thick short ribs are the norm at Spatchcock Chicken and Steak House, with three sauces to choose from. Spatchcock’s red wine sauce gives the steak a slight bittersweet tang while their peppercorn sauce, made with at least three kinds of peppercorns, gives a really nice peppery bite to each Angus beef morsel. Of course, the ever-reliable mushroom gravy is also available at Spatchcock. Potato chips and wedges, mixed veggies and mushrooms are available as sidings.
In the movie Pretty Woman, Richard Gere’s character Edward Lewis tells Vivian Ward, played by Julia Roberts, that salads come at the end of the meal. At Spatchcock, it doesn’t really matter whether you want to eat your salad before or after your main course. What’s important is you do enjoy your salad, and if you’re a sucker for chef’s salads, you certainly will. Made from romaine and red lettuce, and topped with carrots, cucumbers and croutons and sprinkled with grated Parmesan cheese, it can also stand alone as a meal for those who don’t eat meat. Diners have a choice of honey-mustard, Asian or ranch dressings. A tip: dip the potato wedges in the ranch dressing, you’ll definitely like it!
As meal enders, diners can have either the “Molten Cappucino a la mode” or the “Choco Oatmeal a la mode,” both topped with homemade vanilla ice cream.
Spatchcock Chicken and Steak House may not fit everybody’s idea of how a chicken and steak house should be, with its unassuming interiors, but that’s where its charm lies. Imagine a place where you can have a good salad, chicken or steak, with a good bottle of wine to match your meal, with dessert afterwards, and you don’t even have to dress to impress? At Spatchcock Chicken and Steak House, it’s exactly like that. No worries, no frills, just good eating.
