Exotic seafood night
MILLIE: Our dear editor once said food is our love language. Indeed! Obvious ba? We indulge and eat out almost every day, even when there is no occasion. When we travel, the itinerary is planned according to where we want to dine. We usually fly to Hong Kong or Singapore when we want to eat good Chinese food. We love Chinese cuisine. Whenever we celebrate family milestones here in Manila, we usually go to one of our favorite Chinese restaurants. But lately, we have been quite disappointed with the usual restos we frequent. The food does not taste the same, portions are smaller, prices have gone sky-high and the service, sadly, is no longer the same.
My friend Lourdes Chu called me one day to ask how we were and invited us to dine somewhere in Banawe. We hardly ever go to that area, and glad we did as we experienced something new that pleased our palates. It was not the usual dishes like sweet and sour pork, beef with oyster sauce, lemon chicken, steamed lapu-lapu with leeks and the like, but something different, more exquisite and exciting. Mommy Lourdes, as everyone calls her, recounts how the seafood is wild, exotic, and flown in from Palawan, Aklan, Iloilo, and even far-flung Zamboanga.
KARLA: While Mommy Lourdes Chu explains that “hocto” means good kitchen or excellent kitchen, we were being served cha misua. The noodles were so simple yet flavorful that one of our dinner companions actually had three bowls. We had a roasting platter with roast duck and roasted pork but the star of the show were really all these interesting seafood dishes, a lot of them we’ve never tried before.
First were the bamboo clams cooked ancient style with wintermelon or kundol with black beans. For our soup, we had tanguingue fish with bamboo pith. The soup was thick and very tasty and came out to be one my favorite dishes. Bamboo pith is a spongy traditional delicacy known for its immune-boosting properties.
Next dish was the steamed eel in bean sauce. We normally have eel Japanese-style, grilled with kabayaki sauce, but it’s the first time we were having eel with Chinese cuisine. The sauce is complex and a mix of sweet, salty, and umami. It usually takes eight hours to make and gets its saltiness from the fermented black beans and sweetness from the orange peels infused in the sauce. The eel was fresh and could melt in your mouth. Mom instantly said this was her favorite dish from the dinner.
MILLIE: We were served this delightful stir-fried blue crab or alimasag, simply cooked with cauliflower. I am not really into oysters, but was amazed by the tasty oyster cake dish, which had tiny sauteed oysters. The next dish was a rich, umami-flavored fried abalone coated with salted egg, which I had never tried before.
A favorite good luck dish, symbol of wealth and prosperity, is the fried pigeon, lightly fried and succulent, eaten with a dash of special salt on the side. One of the most impressive dishes that evening was the steamed melon fish, wild and caught from Palawan or Roxas, said to be of the lapu-lapu variety. Food kept coming, and we had completely lost track of how many courses we were having. There was even braised beef brisket with radish served in a claypot. Towards the end of the evening, Lourdes asked us to guess what the vegetable dish was, and I guessed it right: the lowly talbos ng camote, lightly cooked with garlic.
KARLA: Mommy Lourdes proudly talks about how they do not use MSG for their dishes. This allows the natural flavor of the seafood to come out. All in all, the dinner was one hell of a dining experience. From learning about how the fresh seafood is air-flown and transported from different parts of the Philippines and Asia, it was an out-of-the-ordinary dining experience for us, as we usually stick to our favorites and can only order so much since it’s usually just the two of us dining. These are the dinners that definitely would be best appreciated with a group of foodies.
