Sunday, June 15, 2008 Father and son: Gene & Gino Gonzalez By Jenara Regis Newman
GENE and Gino Gonzalez are familiar faces in Cebu’s culinary world.
Both based in Metro Manila, they come here to share their expertise and, as well, to check out Cebuano cuisine and delicacies.
Gene said he expected Gino to enter the corporate world as Gino took up business management. To his surprise, he found Gino, after he graduated from college, in the kitchen of the family-owned Café Ysabel. Gino said he wanted to be there. So Gino took up culinary arts, first under his dad, then in Singapore, the United States and France for further training.
Gino was two years old when his dad opened the café. And so Gino grew up going to the café for merienda after school. The love for good food and for preparing them must have rubbed off on him and his sister Giannina, who is also a chef though now she concentrates on food styling. His children, Gene says, have given the family business a “good second wind. Eventually, we hope to find something for them that will be their own.”
Gene started his career as an apprentice in France and from there started to enjoy going to foreign cooking schools, learning various cuisines; last year he went to northern Thailand its cuisine.
He has been in the culinary business for the past 26 years. The café is now on its 27th year. He has another food outlet, Gino’s Fine Cuisine, and he runs a school, the Center for Asian Culinary Studies where he also teaches. He is also a consultant for food and beverage systems. Listen: he has set up 65 restaurants in the past six years. He also writes cookbooks. He says the school is a great base of information and talent.
Right now, his concern “on the practical side” is to feed common people and so his group has come out with recipes printed at the back of sauce bottles and/or fielded out to carinderias or as flyers.
He says: “We’ve become involved in developing more dynamic recipes for the household, especially those with tight budgets.”
Gino is also involved in the school and the other activities his father has. He says working with his dad was challenging at first “bit it’s great. We have a lot of time together.” They go out together to foreign countries or to other places in the Philippines to learn other cuisines or simply to have a taste of the food of the place they visit.
Gene specializes in Asian cuisine and though Gino does Asian food, his specialty is European cuisine. Both are certified chocolate trainers. Of Gino, Gene says: “He is ambidextrous because he has more modern techniques in baking and pastry. He can cook and bake. I can bake but my techniques are antiquated.”
Of their work, Gino says: “We work hard, really hard. But there’s always an angle; the food angle. It is our best bonding activity.”
