A Flour Pot at rainbow’s end
Chef Rhea Castro SyCip of the Flour Pot Bistro and Bakery in BGC and Fatted Calf in Tagaytay says she has two non-negotiables for a good cake: 1. It should melt in your mouth; and 2. It should make you happy.
Don’t make her words melt in your mind if you want to have your cake and eat it, too.
One sunny afternoon at the feel-good Flour Pot Bistro and Bakery at the corner of 27th and 7th streets in BGC, with its butter-yellow façade, floor-to-ceiling windows and floral prints, Chef Rhea spread the qualities of a good cake like soft fresh butter on warm croissant.
“A bite of a good cake should melt in your mouth because that’s a good indication that the cake that you’re enjoying is made with butter. If you need to chew on a cake, most probably it’s not butter. I would never compromise on butter,” says Rhea, who also founded The Fatted Calf in Tagaytay with husband Chef Jay Jay Sycip.
Secondly, the cake should make you happy—no apologies for the calories. Happiness is priceless. It’s the pot of gold (or flour) at the end of the rainbow.
“After two bites and you’re not smiling, then that means you’re not eating a good cake,” says Chef Rhea, who majored in Communications at the University of Santo Tomas before studying to be a chef.
Chef Rhea, who named her baking business the Flour Pot after the terracotta flour pot her aunt had given her when she was a child learning how to bake, says a good cake, or good food for that matter, rises and falls with its ingredients.
Thus, the savory dishes and sweets at Flour Pot are made and baked from the best and healthiest ingredients known to her.
Chef Rhea sources the ingredients only from origins she vouches for.
“For instance, we get our free-range eggs from Batangas. I know the farmer, I go to him personally. I make sure I can see what they feed the chickens. Thus, I know that what I feed my customers is clean.”
“The butter we use is 100-percent pure butter. We get ours from a cooperative in Bukidnon,” she adds.
“Some people would think our cakes are expensive, but when they try them, they know they’re sulit (value for money),” points out Chef Rhea, who used to teach cooking and baking in Gene Gonzalez’s culinary school.
Chef Rhea also uses a bounty of locally grown fruits, like wild raspberries (sampinit) in her cakes and pastries. She and her staff forage for these wild berries themselves in Laguna.
“Sampinit is officially in season and we’ve curated a collection at Flour Pot, which includes Sugar Raised Jelly Doughnuts (brioche doughnuts filled with local raspberries rolled in sugar).”
The butter yellow color theme of Flour Pot was inspired by the SyCip Rum Cake, Jay Jay and Rhea’s first flour production. Rhea’s eyes still light up when she describes the golden yellow hue of the blend of egg yolks, butter, flour, and rum in the cake mold. In fact, she has quite a collection of rum cake molds that she has incorporated them into the restaurant’s decor.
Jay Jay and Rhea both resigned from their stable jobs to be on their own. Flour Pot debuted in 2017. Rhea baked from the kitchen of the first location of Fatted Calf, a house in Silang, Cavite. The cakes were then transported in a refrigerated van to Metro Manila, where loyal clients eagerly awaited them.
“We put all our eggs in one basket,” laughs Rhea. Among Flour Pot’s early supporters was Sen. Loren Legarda, who told her, “I help MSMEs (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises)."
When the SyCips were asked to vacate Fatted Calf’s first home in Silang, the senator offered them a new place to start anew, a modern farmhouse in Tagaytay. She rents out the farmhouse to the SyCips because of their shared cause of “helping farmers and small farms.”
Flour Pot in BGC was born when a couple also in the hospitality business visited Fatted Calf and sampled Rhea’s pistachio cake, which, ironically, she baked out of the blue that night. Smitten, they suggested a partnership with a relative of theirs. And the lid was off Flour Pot.
It began churning concoctions and confections true to Rhea and Jay Jay’s ingredient-based principle and commitment to help local farmers.
Rhea says the food at Flour Pot, whose accent wall is adorned by wooden rolling pins, is “basically comfort food. If you want some downtime, come here.” Any time of the day, that is.
Flour Pot attracts a lot of customers for breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner—but also draws in a lot of people for dessert (after lunch and after dinner). There is actually a dessert niche that Flour Pot caters to till late at night, when the pendant lights hanging from the high ceiling—some of them original wire whisks from Rhea’s kitchen—are dimmed for a soft, buttery glow.
To me, Flour Pot, with its floral murals above the main counter and on one wall in the dining area, and printed on the placemats and coasters on the tables, is flour and flower power.
In fact, Rhea describes their cakes as “bou-cakes.”
According to Irish legend, leprechauns hide a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. At Flour Pot, the reward is just as real—at the end of every happy diner’s rainbow sits a flour pot. Already a legend in the making.
For inquiries, call 09173152130.
