A year ago I wrote about going to Boracay with my friends Nina and Maureen. Maureen, who is now in Milan studying fashion, was the fashion editor for Philippine Tatler at the time and brought with her two restaurant review assignments. What I didn't mention about those reviews is that I snatched them up and did them myself in a bid to become one of Tatler's regular reviewers. My scheming worked, and for a couple of months I reviewed 1-2 restaurants a week for Tatler's "Philippines Best Restaurants 2009" book that came out in July 2009. 11 (count 'em!) reviews. That's a lot of eating and a lot of writing!
For someone whose job involves standing up in front of large groups of people in her underwear, restaurant reviewing is a real challenge. All that food and wine!! But it's worth the risks, as the gig is pretty cool. You grab a friend and enjoy a fabulous all-inclusive meal for two at one of the best restaurants in the Philippines. Then you write it up for the restaurant guide. What a wonderful outlet for the pithy yet flowery style of writing that was honed in my K-12 years at Brearley! The space in the book for each restaurant is very limited - a mere 130 words to sum up the food and help guide the reader to most thoroughly enjoy their restaurant visit, a few words here and there for atmosphere, wine list, service. Buffets are probably the biggest challenge. Both the buffets I reviewed (exquisite ones at the highest of high-end hotels) probably had more food choices than I had words to describe them. And I don't really like buffets - I like to be served when I go out to eat, and I like to focus my attention on a few dishes, preferably my own and a bite or two of my companions'. I come from one of those families where ordering at a restaurant is a group negotiation, oh you're ordering the seabass, I was deciding between that and the lamb but I'll make a deal with you, you can have a bite of my lamb if I can try your seabass...
The reviews I wrote are online at the Asia Tatler fine dining website, Luxe Dining. Here they are:
145 Fahrenheit Prime Steaks & Seafood - sublime, elegant steakhouse in Quezon City
Aria Cucina Italiana - Italian on the beach in Boracay
Cafe Bola- casual Philippine comfort food in Manila
Cibo - Italian cafe in upscale malls all over Manila
Cuillere - Food like what I remember from two weeks traveling in Burgundy, France, on Serendra near the Fort/Market! Market!
Fiesta San Miguel - Pub food of the world at Dusit Thani hotel
Pamana - celebration of Philippine culinary heritage in Tagaytay
Paseo Uno - buffet at Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Makati
Santis Deli and Cafe - Filipino and European deli/cafe in Tagaytay
Seven Corners Restaurant - buffet at Crowne Plaza Hotel, Ortigas
Zuzuni - Greek on the beach in Boracay
The 2010 review season has just begun. I will try to be a more attentive blogger even as the restaurant writing picks up!
Warmly,
Carol
Friday, March 26, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Kinky the Champion of the Road
My friend Sam from New York came to visit and we rented a car, piled in, and drove six hours on a Friday night up to the coast north of Baguio to spend a few days at the beach in La Union province. This was Kinky's second road trip, the first one being to Tagaytay the weekend before I went to Cambodia. Kinky, like family cats Beaver, Chervil, and Snickers, has taken to car travel like a fish to water. After a good visual and nasal inspection of every inch of the car, she likes to settle on the shoulders of either the passenger or the driver, reclining between their neck and the car's neck rest. I'm not sure how well this will work when Kinky weighs more than 2.5kg, but for the time being it's soothing and cute.
La Union is known for being the surfing capital of the northern Philippines and there are many sweet pictures of huge waves taken when the surf has been up there, but by the time we got there mid-March the January to March season had already tailed off. Monaliza, the break reputed to be the best, had some measly 2-foot swell in a roughly 100-meter stretch that was clogged to the gills with surfers desperate for a wave. Excellent surfers – able to catch rides on these teensy waves and then duck and weave around each other with surgical precision. It was a little sad to see them clustered up like a school of fish in an evaporating pond, not to mention intimidating to novice surfers like ourselves. So while we had hoped to do some surfing, we decided to leave the experts to ride their ripples and devote the weekend to the worthwhile pursuits of hanging at our resort Coconut Grove, swimming, drinking Red Horse and San Mig Light, eating, lazing around, and watching Manny Pacquiao and Formula One on the tube. It was a gloriously lazy weekend. Sam, a photographer and videographer, greatly enjoyed shooting pictures of the rowdy local crowd at the beachside bar where we watched the Pacquiao fight. No need for pay-per-view, the owner had managed to hook up a great internet feed of the fight to his TVs.
Monday morning came around as it inevitably does and it was time to load up the car and head back to the city. Departing at 8am with 8 hours until my teaching engagement in Makati seemed like a safe margin. The car was a Corolla, either a '96 or a '99 depending on which rental car employee I asked. No sign of the user manual to verify and I never bothered to check the VIN. Just the type of car I would choose to drive around the Philippines – about a third of all cars on the road here seem to be Corollas. Though I'm not sure I will trust a rental car company again to send such a car out in operable condition – perhaps I should have taken more heed when I had to struggle to get the dipstick back into the car after checking the oil at my first gas stop – I was looking for plenty of oil (check) but not aware of or wanting to think about the disastrous omen portended by a loose dipstick well. Three hours into the return trip we were already about an hour away from my apartment in Quezon City about to exit the SCTEX (Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway) for the NLEX (Northern Luzon Expressway) when the engine started going bang-bang-Bang-Bang-BANG and I could just barely get it to the side of the road before a final heroic BANG!-CRACK!-clunk-sputter announced the end of the engine's life. Smoke seeped out from the sides of the engine. Why I even bothered to try to restart it I don't know but I could swear the engine laughed and cried at the same time as I tried to turn it over. We looked under the hood to see that a HOLE had been punched through the crankcase, and the matching 3x1.5cm oval of flat metal to fit the hole had conveniently landed on a panel shielding the bottom of the car from the road.
Thus began the 7-hour ordeal of making the usually two-hour trip from the top of NLEX to Makati. I called the rental car company and they immediately dispatched a driver with a replacement car. The desk person really wanted me to say the car had overheated. If a renter allows a car to overheat, that's negligence and the renter's fault. When I explained that the radiator was fine, the engine temp gauge was below the middle mark, and that there was a hole in the engine, she backed off a bit. Still, after about 30 minutes when the SCTEX patrol came to get us towed off the road, they initially refused to pay for the tow charge. I put her on the phone with the SCTEX patrol person and it turned out that since we were in a tow-required zone (actually just over the line onto the off-ramp for NLEX) the law required that they pay for the tow. Great tow too – a flatbed tow for P1200!
They towed us to the nearest car shop and the tow operator explained to the rental car company driver how to get there. He'd left at 11am, at this point it was about 1pm, he'd be there soon. And we waited. And waited. We let Kinky out to explore a bit, she was getting pretty warm in the car although the tow operator had brilliantly left it under a big shady tree. The driver texted at about 2:15pm to say he was almost there, about half an hour away. We got some halo-halo at the shop next door. The driver finally showed up at 3:30pm and it was 4 before he'd decided the Corolla was sufficiently incapacitated enough to justify our taking the Altis he'd driven up in – with the tank two bars from empty, which became one blinking bar the moment we started heading south on NLEX. I'd already switched to teach 6pm and 8pm in Makati instead of 4pm and 6pm, but we ended up reaching Makati shortly after 6pm with another teacher covering my 6pm class.
Did I mention that Kinky doesn't use a catbox? Apparently cats learn about using the catbox from other cats. I got Kinky a catbox back in the days when I was still coaxing her to go to the bathroom by wiping her butt, hoping that she would associate the place with the deed when it was time to drive the whole process herself. But Mommy uses the toilet, you see, so as soon as she was big enough to get up to the toilet she started using it Mommy was not interested in using the catbox to demo its proper use, and was also amazed that her genius cat had taught herself to use the toilet at the tender age of a few weeks. Alas, the toilet phase lasted about a week until she got frustrated with sometimes falling into the toilet and noticed that Mommy also sometimes uses her shower (for #1 only of course!!). She quickly adopted the shower as her official bathroom place, sometimes supplanted by the kitchen sink for a tinkle if Mommy is washing dishes. On car trips, the issue has never come up. On other excursions around Manila she's demonstrated the ability to hold it for at least 12 hours – she doesn't like to go in unfamiliar bathrooms – so a five- or six-hour car trip is no big deal.
Here is where Kinky went above and beyond the call of duty. It was time for her Rabies booster shot and we had an hour and a half to kill right around the corner from her vet. So, yes, I took her in for her shot. The little champion whined a little bit while getting the shot (and a LOT while the vet took her temperature, she's not so kinky that she likes that) but as soon as it was over it was like nothing had happened. Then we had to leave her in the parked car on the street for two hours during yoga class – no mess, no fuss. I am in awe of this little girl. She is a superstar and a sweetheart. And she doesn't need any more shots for a year!
La Union is known for being the surfing capital of the northern Philippines and there are many sweet pictures of huge waves taken when the surf has been up there, but by the time we got there mid-March the January to March season had already tailed off. Monaliza, the break reputed to be the best, had some measly 2-foot swell in a roughly 100-meter stretch that was clogged to the gills with surfers desperate for a wave. Excellent surfers – able to catch rides on these teensy waves and then duck and weave around each other with surgical precision. It was a little sad to see them clustered up like a school of fish in an evaporating pond, not to mention intimidating to novice surfers like ourselves. So while we had hoped to do some surfing, we decided to leave the experts to ride their ripples and devote the weekend to the worthwhile pursuits of hanging at our resort Coconut Grove, swimming, drinking Red Horse and San Mig Light, eating, lazing around, and watching Manny Pacquiao and Formula One on the tube. It was a gloriously lazy weekend. Sam, a photographer and videographer, greatly enjoyed shooting pictures of the rowdy local crowd at the beachside bar where we watched the Pacquiao fight. No need for pay-per-view, the owner had managed to hook up a great internet feed of the fight to his TVs.
Monday morning came around as it inevitably does and it was time to load up the car and head back to the city. Departing at 8am with 8 hours until my teaching engagement in Makati seemed like a safe margin. The car was a Corolla, either a '96 or a '99 depending on which rental car employee I asked. No sign of the user manual to verify and I never bothered to check the VIN. Just the type of car I would choose to drive around the Philippines – about a third of all cars on the road here seem to be Corollas. Though I'm not sure I will trust a rental car company again to send such a car out in operable condition – perhaps I should have taken more heed when I had to struggle to get the dipstick back into the car after checking the oil at my first gas stop – I was looking for plenty of oil (check) but not aware of or wanting to think about the disastrous omen portended by a loose dipstick well. Three hours into the return trip we were already about an hour away from my apartment in Quezon City about to exit the SCTEX (Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway) for the NLEX (Northern Luzon Expressway) when the engine started going bang-bang-Bang-Bang-BANG and I could just barely get it to the side of the road before a final heroic BANG!-CRACK!-clunk-sputter announced the end of the engine's life. Smoke seeped out from the sides of the engine. Why I even bothered to try to restart it I don't know but I could swear the engine laughed and cried at the same time as I tried to turn it over. We looked under the hood to see that a HOLE had been punched through the crankcase, and the matching 3x1.5cm oval of flat metal to fit the hole had conveniently landed on a panel shielding the bottom of the car from the road.
Thus began the 7-hour ordeal of making the usually two-hour trip from the top of NLEX to Makati. I called the rental car company and they immediately dispatched a driver with a replacement car. The desk person really wanted me to say the car had overheated. If a renter allows a car to overheat, that's negligence and the renter's fault. When I explained that the radiator was fine, the engine temp gauge was below the middle mark, and that there was a hole in the engine, she backed off a bit. Still, after about 30 minutes when the SCTEX patrol came to get us towed off the road, they initially refused to pay for the tow charge. I put her on the phone with the SCTEX patrol person and it turned out that since we were in a tow-required zone (actually just over the line onto the off-ramp for NLEX) the law required that they pay for the tow. Great tow too – a flatbed tow for P1200!
They towed us to the nearest car shop and the tow operator explained to the rental car company driver how to get there. He'd left at 11am, at this point it was about 1pm, he'd be there soon. And we waited. And waited. We let Kinky out to explore a bit, she was getting pretty warm in the car although the tow operator had brilliantly left it under a big shady tree. The driver texted at about 2:15pm to say he was almost there, about half an hour away. We got some halo-halo at the shop next door. The driver finally showed up at 3:30pm and it was 4 before he'd decided the Corolla was sufficiently incapacitated enough to justify our taking the Altis he'd driven up in – with the tank two bars from empty, which became one blinking bar the moment we started heading south on NLEX. I'd already switched to teach 6pm and 8pm in Makati instead of 4pm and 6pm, but we ended up reaching Makati shortly after 6pm with another teacher covering my 6pm class.
Did I mention that Kinky doesn't use a catbox? Apparently cats learn about using the catbox from other cats. I got Kinky a catbox back in the days when I was still coaxing her to go to the bathroom by wiping her butt, hoping that she would associate the place with the deed when it was time to drive the whole process herself. But Mommy uses the toilet, you see, so as soon as she was big enough to get up to the toilet she started using it Mommy was not interested in using the catbox to demo its proper use, and was also amazed that her genius cat had taught herself to use the toilet at the tender age of a few weeks. Alas, the toilet phase lasted about a week until she got frustrated with sometimes falling into the toilet and noticed that Mommy also sometimes uses her shower (for #1 only of course!!). She quickly adopted the shower as her official bathroom place, sometimes supplanted by the kitchen sink for a tinkle if Mommy is washing dishes. On car trips, the issue has never come up. On other excursions around Manila she's demonstrated the ability to hold it for at least 12 hours – she doesn't like to go in unfamiliar bathrooms – so a five- or six-hour car trip is no big deal.
Here is where Kinky went above and beyond the call of duty. It was time for her Rabies booster shot and we had an hour and a half to kill right around the corner from her vet. So, yes, I took her in for her shot. The little champion whined a little bit while getting the shot (and a LOT while the vet took her temperature, she's not so kinky that she likes that) but as soon as it was over it was like nothing had happened. Then we had to leave her in the parked car on the street for two hours during yoga class – no mess, no fuss. I am in awe of this little girl. She is a superstar and a sweetheart. And she doesn't need any more shots for a year!
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