Edouard Miailhe & Juan Carlos de Terry: The uncanny pairing

I don’t think there could ever be two more daunting men in Manila than Edouard Miailhe and Juan Carlos de Terry.

The first time I met the former was at a champagne pairing dinner a few years back. I was giddy, laughing and chatting with my tablemates, when I suddenly felt two strong hands clamp down on my shoulders. As if that wasn’t startling enough, an authoritative voice started rattling off information about my very personal life in the most rapid-fire French ever. “Are you the Stephanie Zubiri who studied in Paris and used to be with another French man but is now with a certain Jonathan Crespi?” These were his exact first words to me. No hello, no “nice to meet you,” just an affirmation of the truth in the most accusatory form.

I turned around and thank goodness for the champagne-flushed rosy cheeks and the mischievous smile, otherwise I may have just bolted in the other direction! As it turns out, Miailhe is an old friend of Jonathan’s, a hardworking family man and a serious bon vivant. More of a gruff teddy bear than a harsh secret agent.

My first encounter with Juan Carlos de Terry was just as striking. New to the food journalism world, he was one of my first real assignments for The Philippine STAR. Invited by the New World Hotel to write a feature on his specials at their buffet, as soon as I arrived I could plainly see he didn’t want to be there. A skeptical look in his eyes and the stoic facial expression seemed to say, “Who is this little girl who will waste my time with nonsense questions?” The interview started off with simple yes or no, one-word responses. Curt. Aloof. More interested in what was going on in the kitchen. He then learned I spoke French; that I had lived there and that my family was of Basque descent. He also discovered we had something absolutely essential in common — we both loved Epoisses cheese. His heart warmed, the barrier cracked, much like the crisp sugar shell of crème brulee giving way to the rich, soft center — a man who is crazy-passionate about what he does.

Lovely little bites paired with S de Siran 2009

The two have so much in common. The passion. The drive. The hard work and most especially, the no-nonsense approach to life, where they don’t waste time with the usual obligatory social graces. They do what they love, they love what they do and everyone else around them has to live up to that standard.

What exactly do they do? Well, in the food world they stand almost stereotypically as representatives of major culinary cultures. Edouard, a businessman but also owner of one of the oldest family-run chateaus in Bordeaux, Chateau Siran, is as French as French can be. Juan Carlos (affectionately known by a privileged few as JC) is probably the local icon for Spanish cuisine, the man behind the amazing-ness of Terry’s Delicatessen. France and Spain have had a longtime love-hate relationship: the Thirty Years War, mixed Catalan-Basque borders, interrelated royal families (the House of Bourbon), the existential question on which was a more Catholic country, and even more fundamentally, who made better red wine.

On the culinary front, there couldn’t be two more different cuisines for lands so close to each other — delicate, buttery and creamy classic French and bold, spiced and rich Spanish. And yet last, Nov. 21, at a dinner hosted jointly in JC’s newly renovated Tempranillo room of his Salcedo Village Terry’s Restaurant, there were no borders, just pure mutual admiration.

It was a vertical tasting of Chateau Siran, starting with their second wine S de Siran 2009 and finishing off with the elegant Chateau Siran 1998. For a while, Chateau Siran was just the wine of a friend; it wasn’t till I was reading the pages of Don and Petie Kladstrup’s book Wine & War that I learned of the Chateau’s historic significance. The Miailhe family has been in the Bordeaux wine trade for over 200 years; they were of such importance and so respected by the community that their cellar wasn’t touched by the Nazi officers stationed there during the Occupation. Luckily the Nazis kept their distance, because the Miailhe family was hiding some very close Jewish family friends alongside the prestigious bottles and barrels!

The evening commenced with extraordinary little bites such as the croustillant de boudin noir and the choue-fleur en Villeroy prepared by JC, while the two men shared their stories of drunken camaraderie around Ribeira del Duero (“Where ees that restoran again? We ver so drank…” Edouard exclaims laughingly in his mongrel French accent with a Filipino twang), while JC seriously explained the challenging intricacies in pairing vertically: “In essence, it’s the same wine. The differences are subtle,” pointing out that tonight, he made exclusively French food. “Everyone says Terry can only make Spanish food. Today it is all French in honor of Chateau Siran.”  What most people don’t know is that this genius of a man is a hardcore Francophile. That evening he let loose his love for the land across the Pyrenees, serving us French dishes but always with his unmistakable Spanish generosity.

A hearty soup of wild arugula and porcini mushrooms — a unique combination of creamy richness with a grassy lightness. An olive oil-poached codfish with a Provençal sauce that reminded me of the summer I spent by the Mediterranean driving through the narrow roads of the Banyuls region going from port to port, never knowing if I was in France or Spain. It was sunny, the fish was fresh, the sea was splendid and the olive oil equally amazing.

Then there was a duck breast confit on a bed of Puy lentils garnished with roasted local garlic and baby carrots tossed in a balsamic cabernet reduction. My favorite dish of the evening, I gently coaxed out the soft garlic from its burnt skin … the firm but yielding lentils, the tart carrots. The pleasantly precocious Chateau Siran 2005, whose robust yet elegant youth was offset by the humbling simplicity of the dish, was then followed by a delicate and tender soufflé, then radically upstaged by the most uncanny dish of them all — Roquefort ice cream with eucalyptus honey on a bed of olive confit-stuffed crepes drizzled with an S de Siran syrup. Far from the cheese ice cream that your local mamang sorbetero peddles, this was aggressive. Surprising. Unique and utterly réussi (successful)!” The honeyed sweet cool texture punctuated by velvety pockets of savory, musky Roquefort. The bold, almost vulgar olives and that touch of tannic wine. Even more interesting is that it went extremely well with the 1998 Chateau Siran. Ice cream and red wine? A dessert conundrum. Like a strange Dada-esque Dali painting that is quite frankly bizarre, but you don’t know why you like it anyways.  It shouldn’t have worked but it did.

In some surrealist melting-clock, screaming-long-faces type of world where the strange is pleasant and there is no apology for being in-your-face, Miailhe and de Terry are much like this uncanny pairing: bold on bold, extremely complex, shocking, intense and yet a little sweet, with the borders blurred between Iberia and Gaul and the touching element of Filipino after years of living here. Because, despite all their European sensibilities, it takes only a true Filipino at heart to create a cheese ice cream, eat it with wine … and like it.

* * *

Chateau Siran and S de Siran wines can be found at any Terry Selection, Santis Deli, Premium Wine exchange and Wine Story.

Terry’s Salcedo is at G/F Lafayette Square, LP Leviste corner Sedeño Street, Salcedo Village, Makati, 889-3198.