Meet the food activist at Tatung's Garden Cafe

MANILA, Philippines - What’s the next best thing that can happen on a day when you see your child finish college with flying colors? Celebrating the event with a sumptuous meal.

The event becomes more memorable when the feast features fine, innovative Filipino cuisine — a fitting meal for a graduate of the nation’s premier state university. There is a growing movement to promote the fine-dining potentials of Philippine cuisine, and the effort is evident at Tatung’s Garden Café.

Located in the heart of Sikatuna Village, a few minutes’ drive from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, where my daughter Jori is now an alumna, is the residence-turned-dining place of Myke Sarthou, Western cuisine chef-turned-Filipino food activist, who prefers to be called “chef Tatung.”

The first thing that strikes you is why anyone would set up a garden café in a secluded residential neighborhood, where there are few pedestrians, and neighbors might resent the stream of strangers and cars being parked on their street. In fact, when more patrons began visiting, neighbors became suspicious, prompting chef Tatung to put up a restaurant sign on the wall of his corner property. 

Worth all the squid ink: The palabok negra is yummy and the squid ink stains were worth it. Visit Tatung’s Garden in UP Village, Quezon City.

Like most success stories, the journey of chef Tatung started at home. Home was the family kitchen in Cebu, where the young Myke preferred to stay, observing and assisting, instead of hanging out with other kids. His family visited many places, where he did not hesitate to sample interesting flavor combinations. 

After years of honing his skills without any formal training, home became the spacious property in Quezon City. At first, he simply enjoyed entertaining guests and regaling them with the way he toyed around with common ingredients to create extraordinary dishes. Then the guests began requesting if they could use his place to hold their parties. Eventually, word of mouth did the advertising for the yet-to-be-named café, which officially opened in September 2010.

The café initially offered European-Mediterranean dishes. But chef Tatung, who, along with his marketing manager Vic Lactaoen, supports the Organic Producers Trade Association of the Philippines, asked himself how he could champion the cause of the OPTA if he served only foreign cuisine. Going back to his roots liberated him from the shackles of convention and allowed him to unleash the kitchen creativity that he had nurtured since childhood. 

“How do we elevate local foods to a level of sophistication so as to change the Filipino perception of eating?” In response to his own question, he said, “Food is all about sensibilities, so I try to stick to the original essence of every food. If it’s chicken, it should taste like chicken, not like pork or beef.”

It was by word of mouth that I learned of chef Tatung. I checked out the website and liked what I saw, even if only a few dishes were featured. So on one graduation Sunday, food pictures turned into reality. We were celebrating with food that promised to “nourish the body and enlighten the senses.”

House specialty: Chicken sisig lettuce wraps, a combination of minced grilled chicken fillets, chopped onions, green chilies, taro chips, best taken with a dash of mango sauce.

In the “Red Room,” we started off with one of the signature dishes, chicken sisig lettuce wraps, a combination of minced grilled chicken fillets, chopped onions, green chilies, taro chips, best taken with a dash of mango sauce. With our appetite sufficiently whetted, the shrimp okoy followed, fried to perfection, crispy even when drenched with the homemade vinegar that accompanied it. Another starter was the lengua adobo, melts-in-the-mouth ox tongue cooked with green olives and roasted garlic. My son Kado, who is no lengua fan, enjoyed it immensely. And although it is listed on the menu as an appetizer, it could well be part of the entrée, best eaten with pandan or garlic rice.

I would have enjoyed the shrimp and mango salad or the seafood gising-gising, but we skipped the vegetable dishes because the others already contained veggies, such as the pork sinigang, made succulent by slow roasting.

Another artery-busting dish was the honey-glazed slow-roasted pork belly, which, like the sinigang, was fall-off-the-bone tender after spending four hours in a brick oven over a bed of garlic and lemongrass. This was complemented by the adobo bisaya – homage to chef Tatung’s Cebuano roots, with its trademark sukang pinakurat and atchara on the side – and the chicken in roasted coconut and yellow ginger sauce. To complete the meat courses, the chef prepared calderetang kambing with queso de bola, a mildly spicy mutton ragout (or stew) in tomato sauce, with potatoes, carrots, button mushrooms and grated Edam cheese.

On the healthier side, there was the tamarind-glazed butterflied tilapia and the bestselling gindara in coconut cream sauce, a special recipe handed down from the chef’s mother and served with diced shrimps and atchara.

At this point, there seemed to be no more room in our filled bellies for the bam-i and palabok negra, but when we sampled them, the extra calories and squid ink stains were worth it.

Perfect end: Warm tsoknut chocolate cake, a decadent ganache-filled cake topped with local choc-nut.

To cap the meal, we shared warm tsoknut chocolate cake, a decadent ganache-filled cake topped with local choco nut, and banana-buco sundae, a to-die-for combination of fresh banana slices, buco-leche flan ice cream, otap flakes, and latik.

It was a fitting finale to the sumptuous meal. If you’re wondering how a self-taught chef can come up with such innovative dishes, you can simply approach chef Tatung himself and ask him to share his story. He’ll make time for you.

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Tatung’s Garden Café is located at 17 Matipid St., Sikatuna Village, Quezon City, Metro Manila. It is open daily from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. For reservations and inquiries, call 352-6121 or 0915-846-3234, or visit their website www.cheftatung.com.