ANY restaurant needs a chef or chief cook to make all its palatable offerings. The bigger the restaurant, the bigger the responsibility of the chief cook. In the case of Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and Casino, the executive chef is a woman, Linda Hou, who is Chinese but whose specialty is French cuisine. Assisting her in the nitty-gritty demands of the hotel’s food outlets is sous chef Tristan A. Encarnacion.
In an intimate press review, the two chefs presented their signature dishes. Chef Linda presented her marinated salmon tartare with kalamansi jelly and herb cream, which was taste-perfect with just the trace of tartness to blend with the taste of salmon. Chef Linda says she may be trained in French cuisine—and confesses she cannot cook Chinese because she never needed to, her mother doing all the cooking—but she has learned to adapt to “the city or country you are in.” Hence, the use of kalamansi instead of American lemon in her salmon tartare.
For Chef Tristan, the signature dish was roasted beef bone marrow which he described as a deconstructed “sinigang na bulalo.” But hey, where was the soup? And why is there a sprig of sinaw-sinaw in the dish? The sinigang taste was in the meat, as for sinaw-sinaw, Chef Tristan explains his philosophy in cooking. First of all, he is Filipino and he specializes in Filipino cuisine. And beyond specializing, he also innovates.
“I am hungry for knowledge and learned a lot during the Waterfront training. I want to educate a lot and I want our local cuisine to go international, to elevate the food and quality of what you prepare, to invent and invent in order to get better than the day before. I always compete with myself,” he said.
“Filipino cuisine has a background, diversified from different countries and heirlooms. It is a cuisine that signifies tradition, culture and equality. Concentrating on reinventing the dish shows the respect for when it was first created until the present time that it is being cooked. I want to reinvent Filipino cuisine not just for locals but for the global and world market, introducing to the newer generation and riding along and keeping up with the newer trends and demands of the food industry but not to the extent of taking away the heirloom taste of the Filipino dish.”
About his sinaw-sinaw (which actually tastes good), he says that it is “edible, safe to eat, organic and has a lot of nutritional content and value like gutocola, stevia, sampaguita, tawa-tawa, San Francisco and a lot more.”
Chef Linda was with Waterfront years back. This time, she is back as the executive chef and she thinks gender is immaterial in the kitchen workplace. One just has to do the job. It does not matter whether one is male or female. Of French and Filipino cuisine, she says the difference is in “the cooking technology, methods and plating.”
“But if you look and understand what cuisine and food is all about, there is no difference. It will only be different if you don’t have the right attitude, passion, heart and respect in everything you create, cook and do.” Though she does not cook Filipino dishes, she enjoys bistek Tagalog, humba and spicy lechon.
With executive chef Linda Hou and sous chef Tristan Encarnacion in Waterfront Cebu’s kitchen, one can expect a pleasantly new, different and better taste in the offerings at the hotel’s Café Uno buffet, and in its other dishes for gala occasions.