Food for thought How would you describe your affair with eating?
How much time do we devote to eating, especially when we are out there experiencing the larger world? No such thing as a brief meal to me, or even eating on the run, though I have done both on very, very few occasions. Often, it’s either I eat properly—and leisurely—or I don’t eat at all. I’m an intermittent faster by nature. When I was younger, even when I was going to school, the first meal of the day could be 5 p.m., no problem.
But I’ve always had this thing with dinner. I love dinner. There was a time dinner would be the highlight of my day. Depending on company, I could have dinner at 7 p.m. and stay at the dinner table until almost or after midnight or until the waiter shooed me and my friends away.
Sometimes, though I often fail to keep a record of them, I’d like to think that my life is marked by coffeeshops, bakeries, eateries, restaurants, and markets. I grew up on the second floor of a big house, whose ground floor was for a long time a bakery, my mother’s bakery. Her pandesal sort of had a cult following, which was why in the mornings there would be a crowd of people with sleep lingering in their eyes lining up to get their start-of-the-day fix, pandesal delivered hot and fresh in brown paper.
“Where I grew up, my memories could have been warm as a toast, fluffy as freshly baked muffins, and as homey as the smell of bread wafting from the ovens,” I wrote in one of the 16 short stories featured in my 2018 book Manila Was a Long Time Ago. I read in The Journal of Social Psychology, during the research phase of this book, that good aromas made people act kinder to strangers. To prove it, a research team from the University of Southern Brittany in France stationed volunteers in front of a bakery and a clothing store, instructing them to drop a glove or a handkerchief to see how strangers would respond. Seventyseven percent of passersby in front of the bakery responded positively, stopping to retrieve the lost item and to return it to its owner. In front of the clothing boutique, on the other hand, only 52 percent did so.
Growing up just upstairs from my mother’s bakery, I would always be the last one to wake up. My mother would leave a couple of pandesal, a glass of milk, and two eggs sunny side up for me and I would prop myself at the kabisera of our long narra dining table and pretend I was eating ostrich eggs at the Ritz in Paris or the Waldorf Astoria in New York. I didn’t know then that ostrich eggs weren’t even expensive—or even exotic— but over a decade later, while I was a young journalist starting my career in a glossy society magazine, I was served raw ostrich meat at Carpaccio, now defunct, on Yakal Street, by its Swiss owner Werner Berger and, in my head, I was a boy again eating ostrich not in a daydream but in reality.
When I was young and a stranger in a new environment, say, a new school, I always considered it a signal that I had found a friend when a stranger asked what I would like to eat. I spent a year in Baguio in high school and I knew I found my friends when one day, following interactions on campus, I went to a pizzeria on Session Road with them on a lunch break. Before long, we were spending not only all the time at school, but also weekends either guzzling milk in tall glasses full of ice at Mile Hi at Camp John Hay or beer after beer at the club Goldmine at the Hyatt Terraces Baguio, which collapsed later as a result of the earthquake of 1990.
Lunch is tricky. To a nightowl like me, it’s the equivalent of breakfast, meaning I have to wake up for it. I’m trying to remember a lunch that made a mark on me, but I can only go back to when two of Salvatore Ferragamo’s sons were in town on invitation of Rustan’s Tokie Tantoco Enriquez and we had lunch at Prince Albert at the Hotel Intercontinental, now long defunct, its building torn down. That was a lunch so long we had to whisk ourselves away out of respect to the wait staff, who had begun setting up the tables for dinner.
A long lunch is such a privilege, except in places like Brazil and
France, “where long mid-day meals are observed,” according to Dwight Garner in his gustatory-literary memoir The Upstairs Delicatessen, which I am currently devouring after I found it on the New Yorker's Best of 2023 book list. In the Philippines, where we follow the American model, lunch is no more important than a bathroom break—do it quick and get back to your desk. My idol forever Diana Vreelend, editor in chief of the American Vogue from 1962 to 1971, stuck to a very rigid lunch schedule, eating only a peanut butter and marmalade sandwich on wholewheat bread and a scotch or vodka to wash it down.
One of my most memorable dinners was my first time at my friend Don Patrick Baldosano’s Linamnam, an out-of-the-way degustation restaurant nestled in a leafy neighborhood within a village in Parañaque. I met this young chef, only about 22 then, a few weeks before in Iloilo while I was obsessively poring over a translation of the notes the Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta wrote in Italian on the voyage he took with the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan westward from Spain to the East on a Spanish flotilla of five ships. I was tirelessly sharing with him some of the highlights, particularly the parts that wowed me. When
Don invited me to Linamnam the following month, I was so intrigued because the menu was a reimagining of what the people who lived in what would later be known as the Philippines served Magellan, Pigafetta, and the decimated crew when they arrived on Homonhon Island, off the coast of eastern Samar, dying of thirst, starvation, and scurvy from a scuffle with the natives of Guam.
But I also have a hard time forgetting the caviar I had on a yacht, memorable only because it was a rough day out on the water, just a little way off the Manila Yacht Club on Roxas Boulevard. Just as we pulled out of the harbor, the weather turned cranky—the wind blew hard and the yacht bobbed up and down the troubled waters of Manila Bay. Everyone got seasick, running to the deck to get some air, but there was caviar and champagne in the main salon, so I stayed and scooped away. Turbulence, even on planes, never bothers me anyway.
Nothing is more special, however, than the sardines I ate straight from a can of Saba on a camping trip to Mt. Makiling. Still exhilarated—and also exhausted—from having reached the peak, we went back down to a clearing a few minutes from the top, where we set up camp in a patch of grass and my friend heated a few cans of sardines in a pot of water boiled over a portable propane stove. That was some mackerel to remember, better than caviar on a yacht, even the caviar I had on a perfect day, clear, mild, and sunshiny, on the Mediterranean, just off the coast of Cannes in the south of France.