Japanese Cuisine At Hilton Cebu’s Seas

Seas Restaurant is an elegant dining establishment in Hilton  Cebu Resort & Spa. In 2006, La Chaine des Rotisseurs had a wonderful evening called “Cote d’ Azur Gastronomique Fellowship” and your favourite food columnist remembers having feasted on the Poached Crystal Bay oysters, Mornay sauce & fumet de poisson. But man does not live on French cuisine alone, except perhaps the French people; there are other points of the globe where food adventures can be had. Hilton Cebu has plans for 60 days of Japanese food and the “SEAS Goes Japanese” from May 1, 2008 to June 30, 2008, showcasing authentic Japanese classic favourites.

To cook Japanese cuisine, you need a good Chef, preferably Japanese and borrow na lang from Kaishu Seafood Japanese Restaurant, Chef Tsuneo Yokoyama.

 If classic Japanese dishes are served, this means very little work for your food columnist, not to assist the Chef but to sit, enjoy, relax and be among the first personalities to sample Japanese cuisine at the Seas Restaurant (+632 32 4927777, or the Reservations Department +632 32 4927722, or email reservations.cebu @hilton .com).

If the food fare was in the realm of non-classic, that means hard work because I have to know what I eat (ingredients, preparation and cooking method), all the possible nuances about the dish and that means a lot of research.  Slight disadvantage gyud if you write about a cuisine and you had not eaten it in the country of its origins. More so if you had never encountered such dish! My beloved readers demand an accurate food account and I just try my best to live up to such challenging expectations.

There are certain elements basic in Japanese cuisine. This has been summed up by Kaichi Tsuji, a noted chef and a master teacher of Japanese grand cuisine once said “Food should be prepared to do honour to the essence of the materials chosen” (The Cooking of Japan, Time-Life Books).

 In other words, food is best served when it is in season and when its full flavour is expressed without additions to mask taste. Great Chefs like Tsuji further enhance the delights of fine food by devising exquisite presentations that please the eye as well as the palate. Even tableware for each dish is carefully selected to satisfy Japanese aesthetics. 

For appetizers at the Seas Restaurant, we had the following: edamamme (green soybeans), kakuni (cooked pork, Japanese version of our humba!), gazukuni (cooked shrimp with shell). If you take a closer look at the back of the shrimp, Japanese Chefs always remove that black string-like object since this is actually the intestine of the shrimp. Many Filipinos merely cooked the whole shrimp altogether.

We had the regular assortment of sashimi, Sashimi Moriawase and almost always, salmon is found. We start to imagine that this fish comes from those salmon travelling upwards the river to the same spot of sand and gravel where they were born. Actually most of these salmon never saw a river! These salmon is now raised just those chickens in commercial farms. And all my beloved readers know that native animals like chickens always taste better than their caged cousins.

Other classic dishes that were served that night were the gindara teriyaki (grilled gindara with teriyaki sauce), mixed tempura, special California maki and kinuta maki. The latter is very thinly sliced Japanese giant white radish called daikon and only a skilled Japanese Chef can transform the radish into one single sheet, paper thin and no nicks can be found. The experts, on the other hand, transform a carrot into a beautiful fisherman’s net. Your favourite columnist made an attempt to make this and the carrot end in beautiful but julienne strips. Leave this thing to the experts!

Dessert was fruits mitsumame (seaweed jelly cake with sugar syrup and fruits). And then it was time for a serving of saké. They say good saké is always served chilled (so delicate that it can be damaged by heat), mediocre saké can be served warm and bad saké should be boiled.

But that night, I want to drink saké served warm, at a temperature, preferably 37 degrees Centigrade!