20 years to the top

IT HAS BEEN a more than 20year love story between chef Rosario “Sau” del Rosario and food — and all of those years have been condensed in a single volume about an awkward young man from Pampanga who found himself on the streets of Paris, told through the testimonies of the people who know him and through the dishes he loves to cook.

Titled Sau del Rosario: 20 Years of Love+Cooking, the “memoir,” as Mr. Del Rosario called it, is his first foray into publishing; it was done in celebration of his 50th birthday last year.

Junie del Mundo, chief executive officer of PR firm EON, told those who attended the book launch on April 16 how “the awkward Sau who sometimes couldn’t look at you in the eye… bloomed [in Paris].”

“The Parisians loved him… the question was not ‘was Sau ready for Paris’ but ‘was Paris ready for Sau,’ and they were ready… he was like an exotic bird,” Mr. Del Mundo recounted.

The popular celebrity chef trained in Nice, France under the wing of Christian Plumail, a Michelin chef of the L’Univers fame.

The University of the Philippines graduate eventually moved on to the three- Michelin star Le Divellec restaurant in Paris, where he recounted that while he experienced hardship, he learned what he needed to grow into one of the most famous chefs in his home country.

In a 2012 interview with entertainment Web site pep.ph, he told of one of his tasks at Le Divellec: scaling fish. The fish to be scaled would be tossed to him and he had to catch it. “I’d catch it with my apron, so sometimes it would hit my face. Sometimes they’d do it on purpose — they’d toss it too far so I’d really have to run and catch it,” Mr. Del Rosario said in vernacular. Another time, someone threw him an eel, and because it was slippery it fell on the kitchen floor and he searched for it for 10 minutes while the staff laughed at him.

After he left France, he worked at Singapore’s Raffles Hotel for three years before he transferred to Shanghai where he worked in Luna restaurant for two years.

Finally, the Kapampangan chef returned to the Philippines and opened M Café at the Ayala Museum, Chelsea, Madison Grill, Le Bistro Vert and Toro, among several other restaurants.

For his book, Mr. Del Rosario had a personal hand in choosing the cover photo which shows him fully clothed in a bathtub filled with water and vegetables. The chef figured that he was the stock which acts as the base for many dishes.