Fable Café+ Lounge: Fables, flavors, and fantasy

I virtually fell into a rabbit hole last week and found myself eyes wide open in a dreamy, fascinating and enchanting restaurant in BGC.

Aptly named Fable Café + Lounge, it’s a wonderland of colors, shapes, figures and flavors.

I walked inside and first felt like I was in an aquarium, with giant sea grass on the walls and underwater creatures hanging inside rattan pendant lamps.

I looked up to see, suspended from the high ceiling, more light fixtures that resembled either clouds or translucent sea anemones (one can’t be too sure), and more leaves that looked like they were plucked from a giant goddess’ diadem.

Confused whether the restaurant’s theme evokes a landscape, a seascape or the world on the ocean’s bed? Feeling as curious as Alice in Wonderland?

Then you’ve gone to the right place, where the flavors on the menu are, unlike the décor, comfortingly familiar.

Designed by the world-renowned Kenneth Cobonpue and located right beside his showroom at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in BGC, Fable is a magical place that makes you curious and “curiouser,” quoting the fictional Alice in the 19th-century Lewis Carroll novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Alice’s words in Chapter 2 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, capture the essence of how a first-timer at Fable feels. Curious and curiouser.

Further down the restaurant you will see more figures like a rattan giraffe and a glass wall with the words of the novel’s Cheshire Cat, “We’re all mad here.”

“Fable is a handmade abstraction of the natural world. It’s a place of fantasy and color showing us how beautiful nature is even when its pared down to the minimum. When I design furniture, I always have to think of how it goes well with a clients’ existing home. At Fable, I no longer have these limitations. The cafe is a peek into my imagination,” explains Kenneth.

If you have forgotten, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a dreamlike tale that has captivated readers for generations. It follows young Alice, a curious girl who tumbles down a rabbit hole into a fantastical world filled with peculiar creatures, riddles, and absurd adventures. Adventures that mirror some of our dreams that feel so real and yet don’t make sense at the same time.

Scholars describe the novel as an example of the literary nonsense genre.

Fable, according to Kenneth, was inspired by the fables and fairy tales his mother Betty read to him every night when he was a child.

“These beautiful memories are a constant source of inspiration for my work,” Kenneth adds. His mother is also a designer, known for her innovative use of rattan. You could say Kenneth followed in her footsteps.

While the décor elements in Fable are figments of Kenneth’s imagination, the food, under the direction of chef Elso Almondiel, is comfortingly familiar and relatable. We were treated to lunch there by Toni Gregory Palenzuela and Annie Ringor of Bridges, and for appetizers (called “Enchanted Bites”), we had crusted Chipirones of Ursula (crispy baby Aklan squid with chili oil and honey-tomato sauce); and crostinis with the creamiest spinach spread.

We had pechay salad with guava vinaigrette prepared tableside. For mains, one member of our small group had Thumbelina’s Truffle Tortellini (shiitake and button mushrooms with fresh truffle in light cream); another, Australian Beef Salpicao; and myself, Sumo Sea Bass (pan-seared Asian seabass with misoyaki sauce, adlai rice and coconut cream). Another friend ordered good old Clubhouse sandwich.

For dessert, we had the Duchess’ Marquise (dark chocolate mousse) and Fable Cheesecake (classic new York-style cheesecake with a citrusy twist). Not giant sizes, of course. 

After lunch, we were toured around the adjacent showroom of Kenneth’s unique furniture pieces by Fable’s striking restaurant manager, Joyce Gonzaga, a former flight purser at Philippine Airlines. The showroom displayed a bed reportedly like the one sold to Brad Pitt, and a couch reportedly like the one ordered by Mark Zuckerberg.

Our group left both Fable and the Cobonpue showroom filled with wonder, with Toni exclaiming, “This is a place full of fantasy and imagination.”

Indeed, you walk out of Fable with new enchanting fables to share.