BREAD WINNER
In Banawe, a stall called Manu Mano bakes artisanal pan de sal
In light of the recent small lottery crackdown (and subsequent reopening) by the government, I would like to share a joke that I told the owners of this discreet new bakery in Banawe Ave.
Said bakery occupies a barely fivesq.m. space in a commercial building. “If you didn’t make this into a bakery, I bet (get it?) that this would have been a Lotto outlet,” I told Alexa Versoza and Madeleine Dela Torre, two of the people behind Manu Mano, Quezon City’s first artisanal bread bakery.
Versoza and Dela Torre both agreed, laughing. Lotto outlets, after all, are notorious for taking up whatever little space there is, and as everyday Filipinos, we are all in on that joke.
And if not for Dela Torre and her partners, the space could have been a legal gambling operation. But they were decisive. They were going to introduce artisanal bread to the Quezon City crowd. But there was one catch.
In the same building where this new bakery stands, there’s the storied Banawe Bakery that has been around for more than 20 years.
But before you jump to any conclusions, no, they are not
To avoid food wastage, Manu Mano uses crumbs from previous batches to coat their hybrid pandesal. competitors. Dela Torre’s family, in fact, owns Banawe Bakery.
“These are two very different concepts.” One is something with a broader mass appeal, “the other is about making quality and otherwise inaccessible kind of bread available to the greater public,” Dela Torre said.
On the side of the building facing Banawe, a sign reads “Pandesal P3.” While on the Sct. Alcaraz side, a sign depicting two hands put together as if praying is accompanied by the name Manu Mano.
“It means handmade,” Versoza says matter-of-factly. She’s a pastry chef by training who currently works with chef Miko Calo at her newly opened French restaurant Metronome. But prior to that, she staged with Richie Manapat of Panaderya Toyo at The
09/10/2019 10:05 PM
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