Amare is love
RIGHT before the Philippines-wide Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, I received news about the passing of our chef-friend, Chris Locher. While I knew he had been ill for some time, I thought he was still in his element running a new restaurant, Amare by Chef Chris, at the Clark Freeport. I deeply regretted not being able to return for another meal after my first visit in December 2015.
Chef Chris would sometimes chide me that I had forgotten all about him. As it always is, life just happened and I was unable to hop quickly in a car to motor down with friends to Pampanga. We lost touch when he quit Facebook to keep him free of mental stress, as he was undergoing more treatments after his illness returned, and complementing it with a healthier diet.
I first met Chef Chris in February 2007, when the 501 gang and I went to the Clark Freeport for a weekend of card games and also a late joint birthday celebration, where our hosts introduced us to some of the popular restaurants in the area.
The Swiss-born Chef Chris was still overseeing C’italian Dining then, just located outside the perimeter of the freeport, and introduced us to his famous panizza, a super-thin crust rectangular pizza with various delicious toppings, and sliced diagonally. It’s a convenient way of eating the pizza, which you could just roll up and pop into your mouth. That time, Chef Chris absolutely thumbed down the idea of expanding to Manila.
But as fate would have it, Chef Chris began rolling out his sumptuous pizzas and pastas at The Oasis Hotel in Paco Park, serving up lamb ribs and pavlova at Recess along Jupiter St., and, for a time, consulting for the F&B department at The Tower Club. I would snort in laughter and poke fun at him for eventually eating his words about expanding to Manila.
But, oh, we were so blessed with his food.
Chef Chris created dishes inspired by his Italian grandmother and made sure these were served generously, family-style, which was common among Filipino and Italian households. A meal at any of his restaurants would often provoke good-natured life discussions and boisterous laughter in between forkfuls of comfort food and drink.
I somehow stumbled on a Facebook post that showed Amare was still open, as I was preparing for a recent trip to Clark. I immediately messaged the restaurant to ask who was running the kitchen, and found out to my delight that Chef Chris’s significant other—kristine Lou Baltazar—had taken over.
Chef Tin is an incredibly talented pastry chef—her lemon cheesecake is to die for!—and when I met her for the first time at their Makati restaurant, Chef Chris was already undergoing chemo treatment for a brain tumor. I knew the supercharged drug treatment would eventually result in the loss of one’s palate. When I asked about it, he said it was Chef Tin who was helping taste the dishes, and ensure they are exactly the same way as he had prepared them.
The thing about Chef Chris, according to Chef
Tin, is that he had prepared and trained his kitchen staff well. Thus, when he passed, it was as if nothing changed except the chef-patron’s absence in the kitchen. Royce Hotel, where Amare is located, wanted to keep the restaurant open and offered Chef Tin to run it.
To her credit, Chef Tin has been behind the most popular flavors of the rollizas (yes, the former panizza, which they cannot use because it was apparently trademarked by C’s owner), so Amare’s menu is as much her own.
My food buddy Joyce and I started out with a classic Caesar salad to give us the health profile in what was to be a dinner of major carbs. We were
extremely pleased with the Rolliza Amare, with its sweet figs balancing out the salty prosciutto and pungent bite of the Gorgonzola cheese. At this point, I had to order a glass of the house red, to compliment the savory tastes of our meal.
For our main, we had the Lamb Ribs in Merlot Sauce, which was vintage Chef Chris. It was one of my favorite dishes at My Kitchen, although it has had similar iterations in the chef’s former restaurants. Every flavorful bite was so tender, and went well with the mashed potatoes on the side. (Usually, this dish is served with lentils but the restaurant graciously accedes to requests for a starch change.)
To cap our sumptuous dinner, Chef Tin served her trio of desserts—a lemon cheesecake, pavlova, and molten lava chocolate cake. What makes her desserts so appealing is that their sweetness is even-tempered. Nothing cloying and overly sugary that would make the teeth hurt. These are light desserts that leave one longing for more spoonfuls, even if the tummy no longer has room.
“I’m lucky that many of Chef Chris’s staff, either in Manila or here in Pampanga, chose to remain with us,” says Chef Tin. “They honor him by doing everything the way he wanted,” she adds, with each dish being as perfect and well-prepared as if he was there in the kitchen.
Still, I must congratulate Chef Tin for holding her own. The restaurant business is not for the faint of heart, but she has managed to guide it and the staff through the pandemic. On the Monday when we were there, there were tables of families, heartily dining on the restaurant’s popular fare.
This Father’s Day, you might want to honor your dearest papa with a great Italian feast. A meal at Amare by Chef Chris will show exactly how much you love him.