Saturday, August 30, 2008 Old haunts By Ober Khok Sira-sira store
YOU receive so many invitations from friends to fine dine at this or that restaurant. You go through long stemmed glasses filled a quarter full with white wine or red wine, gorge on delectable appetizers and have to remind yourself that the main course is yet to come.
Spoiled, that’s what your tongue has become lately.
Numb from consuming judicious servings of tiramisu, black forest, and flan cakes (soaked in orange sauce); soups ranging from light to heavy, creamy to clear; green, mixed, raw salads; pasta covered with every conceivable sauce you can think of; meat either grilled, baked, boiled, orfried; fish cooked as they do in Madrid, Japan, China — practically a global menu, enough to make a United Nations of Gastronomic Delights.
There’s nothing wrong with fine dining, really. It’s finding out what chefs in the upper echelon of the kitchen do to noodles or slices of white fish.
A chef I know swears by olive oil to sauté garlic and he uses mozzarella cheese to top spaghetti al dente.
None of that for Manang Jo who sautés garlic with yesterday’s used coconut oil, mixes cheap banana ketchup to the tomato sauce, and uses quick melt cheese to top spaghetti boiled beyond recognition.
The result is a difference in taste and texture, and price, of course.
When you’re just hanging onto your last paper bill till payday, you know which chef wins your valuable treasure and attention.
In fact, when you’re tired of all the food prepared by a man who wears a toque (hat worn by chefs; the higher, the more seasoned he is, if I may use a pun), you turn to your old haunts.
It is a riskier decision owing to the less than sanitary standards in those places they call “restaurants.”
Out there man, commerce and that particular marketplace odor mingle to give you a clearer idea of what the other side of Cebu City has to contend with.
Whether it’s Pasil, Taboan or Carbon market doesn’t matter to you.
They are as interchangeable as meat plate and dinner plate. In fact, in those generic restaurants there, the proprietor uses meat plate for dinner plate. Who cares? It’s what’s on the plate that matters.
When you start losing touch with the other side of you, there’s nothing better than to get up and take a ride to your old haunt.
You still have to find a fine dining restaurant that can approximate Pasil’s tinowa (fresh fish boiled in a soup made with tomatoes, green onions, and a cup of kamunggay leaves).
How do those chefs in Pasil do it?
How do they achieve that light kind of sweetness balanced with enough saltiness punctuated with just a hint of acidity?
You slurp the soup with the hunger of man who has not eaten for a year, and as you do so, you can hear the foul-mouthed fish monger curse a housewife who is pinching the tuna.
In the background you can also hear the hum of traffic, the tenor of a dog barking, the alto of cats fighting, and the soprano of a child crying.
It’s the same with Carbon, where your favorite is deep-fried ginabot (the membrane attached to the intestines); and in Taboan where you found the best puto maya (glutinous rice cooked in coconut milk).
The vintage aromas of the city are here, too: the smell of fresh fish being sold in open stalls, the objectionable odor of dried fish, the rising smoke of grilled food, and the distinctive scent of humanity.
You can’t find all these in fine dining restaurants where everything is sanitized and written in a menu.
