Restaurateurs reach out to Pinoy farmers

MANILA, Philippines - The community of restaurants (mid to high end) is now making an effort to reach out to Filipino farmers in shortening the supply chain so that the farmers are assured of markets while buyers get better rates in their purchases.

The restaurant owners and operators belong to a small community whose members talk about suppliers and prices so that they get better rates for the farm produce they need in their operations.

  “We try as much as possible to work with local farmers. Our vegetables are local, half of our proteins are imported (since some local suppliers do not want to supply us),” said Jonas Ng, president/CEO of the Mango Tree Bistro, a franchised brand from Thailand.

He said when Mango Tree started it used to import all its ingredients. “Now we buy abroad only those that are not available locally such as the sticky jasmine rice, which we don’t have here.”

 “I’m a big supporter of Buy Philippines products. I import only those that I can’t source here. We don’t have the sticky jasmine rice here. In Bangkok they have a lot of sticky rice but the kind we import is the sticky jazmine. Our condiments,  like soy sauce, fish sauce and even vinegar are different from what is available locally,” he added.

 “The oyster sauce sold in the country is very Chinese and not according to Thai taste. Their vinegar is very different from ours. We only have coconut and sugarcane but theirs is palm. I get organic herbs from Cavite. Most of our fish is local except some that I have to import,” he said.

Last year, he said, the restaurateurs found a way of extracting ubod in a sustainable manner because ubod itself is not sustainable. “Imagine you cut a whole palm tree for one kilo of ubod.”

Now they were able to engineer through science a breed where you just cut branches in three months. Chateau and a couple of other restaurants are promoting that item. The heart of palm is very healthy. There are people like us who are more conscious of sustainability and what we put down in a plate, he said.

He also gets his cooking staff raw. Some started as dishwashers then later on trained to cook Thai food. “Because we work within a system, some learned in a couple of weeks some took months and still could not get it.”

Mango Tree is open on Sundays through Thursdays until 11 p.m. but Fridays and Saturdays it is open until midnight or 1 a.m. “We still have not gauged the crowd here (Greenbelt 5) so well yet. We have a lot of return guests. We have guests who come two or three times a week. Prices are very reasonable. I’d say we are lower priced than Peoples Palace,” he said.

His partners are well established in the retail industry but their common denominator aside from the fact that three of them are relatives, is they all love Thai food. He took culinary arts in Vancouver as a second course. But he goes through regular training (two to three times a month he goes to Bangkok) to learn more about Thai food.

Thai cuisine is more popular with fitness buffs and the most popular dishes at Mango Tree are pomelo and prawn salad; Pad Thai; Tom Yam; grilled chicken and shrimp cake.

In the restaurant business, everyday you learn new things. Since my staff are the ones in the frontline, they are able to find out new things from either the customers or from the kitchen or even the market place. If a person does not do anything but chop garlic every day, do you think I would know more than him. Definitely he gets to discover new things and ways to do things more effectively and apply them himself. It’s a daily learning process. So you need people who are able to follow instructions and creative as well to come up with solutions to daily problems.

It’s a factory model. Restaurant business is a combination of manufacturing plus retailing. The manufacturing line is the kitchen and the retail line is where food is served. We do time and motion studies so we know how much time they should take for certain dishes so the guests do not wait so long. Everything is planned well, he said.

We also come up with back up plans in case of emergency. In Trinoma they experienced having SRO the time storm Pedring hit while us in Greenbelt had no customer. They were understaffed but they managed. I teach trainees to be good at both manufacturing and retailing..

He finished philosophy in Ateneo, which enabled him to always treat life as a learning opportunity. “You always look at the world in both the big and small picture. You are always in the process of becoming. You can’t stop learning.”

He explained that the usual Thai street foods are very spicy because spices are preservatives and in the streets you don’t have refrigeration. A lot of foods we eat are dictated by the climate by our proximity to our neighbors, what the terrain and culture dictates. Thai food is very Southeast Asian, a lot of Malay influence, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Chinese influence.