Are we there yet?

Norma O Chikiamco
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Publication Date : 07-07-2008




I feel disheartened every time I hear people extol the virtues of Asian cuisine. Most likely they'd be referring to Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian or Chinese food; just as likely there won't be any mention of Filipino food. As if it isn't hard enough being called the Sad Sack of Asia, they have to snub our cuisine too. Not to be dramatic about it, but that's like pouring vinaigrette on our already festering wounds. As with our government, we can't seem to get our act together when it comes to making our food acceptable to others.
Is Filipino food meant to be loved by no one else but us?
Maybe it's because our food is indistinguishable. Being an aggregation of Spanish, Chinese, Malay and American influences, it's neither East nor West, neither here nor there. Ours is probably the only country in Asia where American hamburger is seasoned with Chinese soy sauce, 'Italian' spaghetti is cooked with hot dogs and Chinese dishes are called by Spanish names (as in camaron rebosado, morisqueta tostada). And where else but in the Philippines can one find a dish called Arroz a la Cubana which doesn't exist at all in Cuba? All these alongside our own homegrown favourites such as dinuguan, sinigang, pakbet and tinola. Being accustomed to all these, we probably take them for granted. But a foreigner trying our cuisine for the first time would probably be scratching his head, wondering what culinary circus he has stumbled into.
And yet, this shouldn't really come as a surprise. Ours being a hybrid culture, it's but natural that our cuisine should be a mishmash too - part East, part West, and everything in between. Some of our dishes were learned from our colonisers, others from our ancestors and a few we invented ourselves, never mind that the country after which we named our invention may be totally unaware of the honour.
That is why it's so gratifying when, once in a rare while, we get a bit of unsolicited publicity. I almost jumped with pride and joy when I saw Martha Stewart featuring Filipino cuisine in her highly-rated TV shows. With Martha by his side, Filipino chef Romy Dorotan demonstrated how to cook lumpia (spring roll) and adobo (meat cooked in spices, vinegar and soy sauce). The doyen of domesticity even had some favourable words to say about our cuisine and pronounced Romy's cooking delicious.
Likewise, in an issue of Gourmet Magazine a few years ago, halo-halo (a mixed of caramelised fruits topped with crushed iced and evaporated milk) was included among the featured Asian ices. And in the reality show Fear Factor (and later, in The Amazing Race Asia), one of the challenges contestants had to hurdle was eating balut, the dark, forbidding unhatched duck embryo that's a unique Filipino delicacy. As expected, it had some contestants gagging, and while this might have given Filipino cuisine some notoriety, it at least brought our much overlooked cuisine its 15 minutes of fame.
Maybe we should take our cue from the Americans. A few decades ago, American cuisine was being derided as consisting of nothing more than hamburgers and hot dogs. Even Julia Child herself once acknowledged that post-war American food was all about tuna casseroles and TV dinners. And yet look where it is now. In the '70s, Alice Waters and company launched a culinary movement advocating the use of fresh and seasonal ingredients - which California was more than ready to supply. Tex-Mex cuisine has come into its own as a major player in the culinary field, and American chef Thomas Keller has been hailed as one of this century's greatest living chefs. Today with even European chefs opening restaurants in major US cities, American cuisine is certainly nothing to sneer at.
One factor that helped bring this about was the opening of more culinary schools in America. Suddenly cooking was no longer just a past time or an avocation. It has become a prestigious career, as respectable as going to law school or taking up medicine. In addition, with the food channel airing cooking shows round the clock, chefs have become superstars in their own right, not unlike the supermodels who've become the staple of tabloids.
With more and more young Filipinos now going into culinary arts, is our cuisine then next to be launched into international stardom? Is a renaissance of Filipino food soon in the offing?
I wish the answer could be “yes”, but I think it's more of “not yet”. True, there has been so much renewed interest in dining out, and options for the dinner crowd have expanded tremendously. And yet, what I see is young chefs opening Greek restaurants and French bistros, working in international ocean liners and developing recipes for American food imports. Few are those who have ventured into Filipino cuisine, or who've championed the cause of Pinoy (slang for Filipino) food. Maybe it's because other endeavours are more lucrative. Maybe chefs feel (with reason, I believe) that their countrymen wouldn't pay restaurant prices for dishes they can cook at home. Maybe it's just a reflection of the diversity of our culture that our chefs can adapt so easily to foreign cooking.
Which brings us back to where we started: Filipino cuisine as the outsider looking in, the uninvited guest to the feast. Will we ever find ourselves the belle of the ball?
Recently someone said something about Filipino food being the best kept secret of Asia. And there perhaps we've found our squeeze, our rightful position in the global community. Filipino food as the ultimate culinary secret, a hidden treasure whose bewildering ways are understandable only to a chosen few. Never mind being snubbed and being obscure. While others are unaware of this last frontier, it's ours to savour and ours to enjoy. After all where else can one find pitisu, a derivative of the French petite choux, side by side with pancit (dry noodles) Canton (which isn't really from Canton) or lumpiang (spring roll) Shanghai (which isn't really from Shanghai either).
It's circus cuisine all right, and we don't have to force others to buy tickets to the show. If it's Asia's best kept secret, let's just keep it that way. Let's conspire not to tell the rest of the world about it.