No good Pinoy restaurant abroad

Last Monday, I shared with readers of this column, my sister’s e-mail lamenting the difficulty of finding a good Pinoy restaurant abroad. My sister lives in the Washington DC area and she observed there are Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese and Indian restaurants everywhere but hardly any Pinoy ones.

When she and her American husband visited Hawaii the other week, they looked for a Pinoy restaurant there too, thinking that because a large number of Pinoys reside there, that wouldn’t be difficult to find. But to their disappointment, they found out there was not even one good Pinoy restaurant in Honolulu, one with good food and yes, sanitary.

I have experienced that frustration. I was in freezing Winnipeg in Canada last year where there are 40,000 Pinoys and just a sprinkling of Thais and Vietnamese. How come the Thais, and now the Vietnamese have good restaurants there but we don’t? At least, not good enough for my Canadian hosts to want to bring me to.

So the question remains: Why are there no good Pinoy restaurants abroad? Is our cuisine not good enough to tempt the palates of other cultures? Is it too ordinary? Does it lack the character of Thai and Vietnamese cuisine?

Anyway, a number of readers eagerly responded to that question I raised about Pinoy cuisine abroad. Reader A. Reyes, an investment banker, wrote to point out that "there are a couple of Pinoy restaurants here in Manhattan that, in my opinion, can be considered at par with the other mainstream restaurants in New York. These are Cendrillion in the SOHO district and Dragonfly in the Village district."

Of course… of course. How could I have forgotten Cendrillon. It was critically reviewed by the New York Times and it is owned by a former classmate of mine at UP, Amy Besa. I haven’t been there and I must remember to drop by when I find myself in New York.

Mr. Reyes continues: "Cendrillion’s menu is Pinoy fusion-inspired while Dragonfly serves classic items like kare-kare and crispy pata along with other Asian delicacies like satay and curry. I have tried these restaurants myself and my overall impression was very positive in terms of ambiance and quality of cuisine. My non-Filipino acquaintances also gave positive feedback on both establishments."

But, Mr. Reyes agrees, "there are not enough Pinoy restaurants of the same caliber in other locations. However, I would like to think that this might have more to do with supply and demand. If demand for Pinoy food was really very strong among mainstream diners, then many other enterprising people would have thought of putting up lots of Pinoy restaurants by now."

Supply and demand may indeed explain the problem, but then again, I am sure the Thais and the Vietnamese didn’t have a demand for their cuisine when they introduced their kind of cooking internationally. We have been trying to put up Pinoy restaurants abroad even before they tried putting up theirs. There must be other reasons why they made it and we didn’t.

Manny Gonzalez, the man who thought out and carried out the dream resort that is Plantation Bay in Mactan, also wrote to share his views on the matter. "Having lived for some 25 years in some of the world’s major culinary cities (New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, LA, Washington DC, Hong Kong, and Vancouver)," Manny wrote, "I had long puzzled over the very same question you posed today — why are there no good, enduring Filipino restaurants abroad?"

"In the course of the past 10 years, based on what I have learned at Plantation Bay and its four restaurants and banquet business, I have developed some ideas on this subject. Before anything else, the problem is NOT that we can’t cook. Nor is it (as you wondered) that Philippine food is just not suited for international tastes.

"Some years ago, an Asian Wall St. writer ventured that Filipino food is "low class" or "derivative/copied" (allegedly because there was no true aristocratic class in the country to stimulate culinary achievement). I quickly wrote the Journal, and pointed out that (with all due apology to non-Filipinos who may be reading this): 1,000 years of English nobility had produced little better than boiled beef; while Scotland’s claim to fame is haggis (boiled sheep entrails made into a sausage);

"All of Scandinavia combined has contributed no food of note to the world except shark buried and left to rot for six months; the cuisine of the entire Middle East can pretty much be described as stewed sheep, grilled sheep, grilled ground sheep, etc; many elements in Italian cooking are borrowed (pasta from China and tomato from Mexico, olive oil from Greece); Indian and Pakistani cuisine are both one-note sambas (curry and tandoori);

"Meanwhile, though some interesting foods have come out of France, its most substantive contributions to the diet of mankind are French fries (potatoes by the way are from South America), pork and beans, and Spam (tin-canning x pork rillettes); and Japan’s "unique" contributions to world cuisine are raw fish, raw fish with rice, and raw fish rolled in seaweed (tempura is from Portugal, teppanyaki from China).

"You can go around the world’s countries one by one, and if you have any understanding of food and food history at all, will be hard-pressed to build a convincing argument that Filipino food is appreciably inferior in any respect to most others. So why are there no good Filipino restaurants abroad?

"Filipino restaurants abroad (being owned by Filipinos with Filipino weaknesses) are prone to stumble at several key stages:

"Ownership. They are owned by someone who "knows how to cook" but doesn’t have enough of the professional qualities needed to be a successful restaurateur.

"Business Concept. Inevitably, the target clientele is Filipinos, rather than the population at large. Thus, the restaurant will emphasize low cost, and fail to appeal to most potential patrons. Relying on Filipinos for their business, they will make little effort to adapt dishes to more general palates, not even in the matter of presentation or portion sizes. (Do you imagine that the Mexicans conquered the US masses with the very same taco they make at home?)

"Menu Development and Cohesion. At Plantation Bay we take the view that a menu is a team and each dish has a different role to play; some dishes are "stars" (hard to do, but worthwhile because they draw customers to come specifically for that dish), some are "good soldiers" (easy to do, little spoilage, reliable seller); some may play other kinds of role such as "loss leader" or "odd-man consolation".

"In contrast, in most Filipino restaurants the menu is chosen not by rigorous evaluation but by acclamation — Ma has a recipe for this, Baby knows how to cook that, Boy wants to see this. . .

"Indifference to Quality. Here is where good Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese restaurants consistently score points over Filipino rivals; their cooks and owners know how the food should look and taste, and they care. At the Filipino restaurant, "Puwede na ‘yan" is the refrain, not "it’s got to be right".

"Greed. If perchance a restaurant survives its launch, sooner or later it will occur to someone to suggest that their profit could be even bigger, if only some corners were cut. Now, in many restaurants, a dish sold for $10 costs only $4 in raw materials. Here is where a particularly Filipino form of insanity will come into play:

"At some point in a restaurant’s life-cycle, enormous energy will go into trying to reduce the $4 to $3.60 (thereby "fattening" the profit margin from $6 to $6.40) — frozen shrimps instead of fresh-peeled; supermarket-sale chicken instead of farm-bought; etc. The effect of this of course is that the dish will decline in quality. And just in case the customers don’t notice the decline, then another round of corner-cutting will ensue, in hope of raising the $6.40 profit to $6.60, and so on. It is a process with only one possible outcome: unhappy patrons, less business, less profit, and ultimately failure of the enterprise.

"So, Boo, the restaurant business is a showcase for well-accepted Filipino weaknesses such as inadequate planning, wishful thinking, pakikisama instead of discipline, disinterest in producing a quality result, and greed coupled with dicey arithmetic.

"When at last we see a Filipino restaurant in London succeed, and stay in business for many years, then perhaps that will be an indicator of a turn for the better in the Filipino character."

More on this issue on Monday, including a comment from an OFW in Saudi Arabia.

Waiter’s thumb

This one’s not about a Pinoy restaurant. I just googled it.

A man in a restaurant orders the house special. An old waiter brings out the order beginning with some hot soup. The customer notices the waiter has his thumb in the soup.

Feeling sorry for the old man he doesn’t mention it, and leaves the soup uneaten. When he brings the main course his thumb is in the potatoes. Then in the coffee.

Finally, he angrily asks the waiter why he has his thumb in all his hot food. The waiter says, "I have arthritis and the doctor told me to keep it in something warm." The customer says, "why don’t you stick it up your ass!"

And the waiter says, "I do that in the kitchen!"

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]