Let me take you on a mouthwatering, nostalgic trip to the Philippines

I was fortunate to have traveled extensively in the country and to have lived in four cities for part of my life there. I still have vivid memories of the food I had savoured in many places and hope you will join me in evoking the flavours and aromas of my favourites.

Cebu was a central location for meetings and conferences when dealing with projects and programs in Southern Philippines. It was second to Metro Manila in sophistication, with a busy airport and hotel industry. Thus, I had traveled to the Queen City of the South quite often. Every trip to Cebu was an opportunity to eat at Ding Hau, a Chinese restaurant on the second floor of a building, where waiters serving dimsum wore masks, pre-SARS, and carried the dishes on a tray with a neck strap. We went to Ding Hau for the Chicken Steamed Fried Rice. It was a bowl of saucy rice with chicken and vegetable toppings. I figured this dish was cooked twice, both steamed and fried but I did not know the order of the cooking. It was a dish I had tried to replicate without success because I couldn’t figure out what gave it its rich flavour. Oyster sauce? Not just that. Seafood broth? Maybe. I later learned from a former officemate who recently immigrated to Ontario that the cook had left the restaurant and had taken the recipe with him.

I lived in Davao City for a year and it is one of my favourite cities. It is a foodie’s paradise --- Margie Moran, take note. This was where I tasted and got hooked on durian. Part of my orientation to the city was a trip to the fruit market. My guide purchased a durian fruit and we ate it right on the street, seated on the sidewalk curb. It was like taking medicine --- I had to stop breathing so as not to smell it. One seed and that was it. The next days, everyone I met made me eat durian. It was like an initiation and the key to the city. Over time, I got to like it. Davao had other fruits not common in Manila, like the rambutan and the mangosteen. And of course, bananas and pineapples were more abundant in Davao.

Tuna and other deep water fish were available fresh and the people of Davao had several versions of kinilaw. My landlady’s son added black beans to it which was unique. Grilled panga (jaw) of tuna was a popular pulutan --- but the men won’t share it with you if you don’t join the tagay.

In Chinatown, I had a meal cooked at the table consisting of different kinds of meat and seafood, vegetables and noodles. A pot of broth was set to boil on the stove built in the middle of the table and the ingredients were cooked it. And then a curried sauce was added. I had tried restaurants in Manila offering a meal similar to this one, under the name of Steamboat or Mongolian Barbecue or Korean Hot Pot, but they were not the same as the Davao meal. I suspect that the Davao version has some Malaysian or Indonesian influence.

The food in Zamboanga also has this influence, although it is stronger in the cooking of Muslim families. I had met some Muslims from the other southern provinces who were studying in the city and they had served me some wonderful curried dishes that I found in the menu of a Malaysian restaurant here in Toronto. Turmeric is a common spice in their cooking and coconut milk is also often used. The seafood curacha, a kind of lobster, is only found in Zamboanga.

In Cagayan de Oro, I had the privilege of indulging in sweet soft-shell crabs and super-sweet lanzones from Camiguin Island. And a once-in-a-lifetime experience of having a whole calf barbecued in my team’s (small government bureaucrats that we were) honour at a ranch somewhere in Mindanao.

As a child I always thought of Baguio as a vacation city and could only imagine what it was like to be a permanent resident there. One time, I went there with an officemate who was born and raised in the city and got to experience life in a house, not a hotel, cottage or inn. Their house was on a cliff and there were watermarks where the flood rose in a recent storm and rocks from a recent landslide. It was New Year’s Eve, so they slaughtered a goat and made kaldereta and papaitan. I heard the goat cry like a baby so I couldn’t eat the meal. Fortunately there was also dinuguan. Pork (or was it goat too?) with skin and fat was cooked until a little burned on open fire and then chopped. There was not much bloody sauce, it was a little dry. This, I was told, was the Ilocano version.

In Iloilo, the best batchoy I have tasted was in the market. But the best pancit molo I have eaten was made by an officemate who was born in Iloilo but didn’t grow up there. The best sisig and buro I have experienced were in Manila, in artist and gourmet Claude Tayag’s Trellis Restaurant in Diliman.

There are countless restaurants in Manila but once in a while a gem among them is discovered by some restaurant critic or a fellow foodie like Doreen Gamboa-Fernandez. My friends and I had followed their leads, trekking to the penthouses of Makati buildings and some out-of-the-beaten paths. Some of these discoveries became too sought-after that they eventually expanded and lost their appeal. I remember the Chinese restaurant in the Pacific Bank building, the Meralco Lighthouse, the restaurant operated by nuns in Paco, Mr. Poon’s restaurant near the Luneta, the kangkong dish at Whistling Oyster, Nandau (for their merlin steak and merlin belly sinigang), Madrid (for the tender roasted suckling pig which could be sliced with a plate), the Manila Hotel Cafe (for bibingka), Josephine’s (for the halu-halo), Tagaytay (for the mushroom burgers), the estero near old Escolta, the reclaimed lands of Cavite, and even some temporary construction sites (of course, you can follow the caterer from one project to the next).

Yes, I’ve been here and there. You can’t scare me with your indigestion stories. When it comes to food, I am adventurous.