If you think Oodys is a restaurant whose identity is all awry, the answer is yes and no. It is traditional Asian, but very unconventional and global in everything else, borrowing flavors and elements from all over. For instance, one doesn’t think of margarita or cabernet sauvignon or Tom Collins with Pad Thai, or jazz music with Fried Shrimp Wanton. Or even a bar in a Chinese restaurant. Lest you think it’s all about ambience, it’s not only that that draws the crowds to this new foodie retreat but, like all restaurants that ultimately become classics, it is the food that people go back to.
In this case, it is the noodles, the rice dishes and the congee. Cooked more than a hundred different ways. Which is why co-owner Maritel Nievera declares bravely that she can eat at Oodys for a whole solid year without getting tired of the food? We would have said, "Wanna make the bet more interesting?" but her partner Dori Shani points out, "And she will only repeat the dishes twice."
So perhaps it is true what the London-based Sumatran chef Sri Owen said in her cookbook: You can go on improvising forever with noodles. It is a cliché, sure, but the possibilities of noodles are really endless.
And that, it seems, is the whole point of Oodys at Greenbelt 3. With the 10 or so kinds of noodles that they import (they have egg noodles, cellophane noodles, rice noodles, Japanese noodles, Italian noodles, etc.) and the hundred ways they cook them, why settle for the familiar dish that you order every time you eat out? Sure, Filipinos stick to one favorite dish until they wear out the cooks – we’re known for that (like how many Filipinos will not order tempura when eating in a Japanese restaurant?). But Oodys brings out the adventurous foodie in the diner.
We look at the menu and can’t decide what to order. Shall we go with Thai cuisine, Vietnamese, Hong Kong, Chinese, and Singapore or, since the Scottish-British-Spanish hunky Dori is at our table, shall we order Italian pasta cooked the Asian way? Shall we order Fried Pork Balls (P95) or the Boiled Soft Pork Balls (P95)? And what noodle salad should we start with, the Spicy Egg Noodle Salad with Minced Pork and Seafood’s (P95) or the Spicy Chinese Noodles Salad with Seafood’s (P119) or go with the Papaya Salad (P69)? Of the soups, we narrow our choices to Thai Rice Noodles with Beef in Concentrated Soup (P119 ), Thai Rice Noodles with Pork in Clear Soup (P149) or in Hot Spicy Soup (P149). We get our favorite Tom Yam, which is so aromatic that we can almost taste it even before our first spoonful. Shall we go with rice, too, and try Fried Rice with Mixed Seafood (P129), Fried Rice with Salty Fish (P129), Fried Rice with Shrimp Paste (P139) or Rice with Pork and Garlic (P129)? Of the Japanese noodle section, we try the Ramen with Shredded Crab Meat Omelette and Vegetables in Thick Gravy (P179), and of course we have to get from the Italian section: Fried Spaghetti with Clams and Chili Paste (P119) – a personal instant favorite – and Fried Spaghetti with Chicken, Chili and Basil Leaves Thai Style (P119).
It took Maritel and Dori about six months to conceptualize the restaurant. They had been traveling all around Asia when the idea of Oodys hit them.
"It was quite good," says Dory of the collaboration. "She’s more on the food and the taste side. Me, I’m from the business side, coming from an investment company that has interests in tourism. It was a good combination. We didn’t take it seriously. We were just talking and talking and she wrote down everything and we said, let’s go ahead and do it. It was a lot of fun."
So why did Maritel – the restaurateur who started Cabalen from a roadside restaurant and the Kapampangan restaurant Mangan and the Pinoy resto Ebun with Ricco Ocampo and Rikki Dee – choose Asian cuisine this time?
"It was because of Dori," she says. "I couldn’t go into this kind of cuisine without him."
Dori knew the food business despite the fact that he’s admittedly a non-foodie and from Scotland and England (whose cuisine is not all that exciting, to put it politely), but he’s lived and worked in Asia for more than 10 years with Hong Kong as his base. As a businessman involved in tourism, he knows what people like to eat and how they want to eat it. So he and Maritel designed the restaurant, employing a universal, modern approach to Asian dining. No banana mats as in Thai style and no tatami mats as in Japanese style.
As the tag line of Oodys says, "Experience the Sensation of the New Generation." Diners today, it seems, want to eat in a modern place – nothing blatantly Asian except for the contemporary ceramic flatware and cutlery which are all imported from Bangkok. In fact, if you look at the restaurant during the day, you would think it was some kind of a no-borders type of cuisine; and at night, when the lights are dimmed, the candles lighted and the music gets louder, and people having a merry time at the bar flirting shamelessly with each other, you’d think it’s a hip bar, and not a place where you could get soused on a bar stool and then eat congee to bring you back to earth.
That was Dori’s touch – a bar in an Asian restaurant, which by the way doesn’t serve rice wines if you’re wondering. The bar makes the restaurant different – again, something you don’t expect of a noodles, rice and congee place.
So what drinks go with noodles rice and congee? "Originally, nothing, because people would take tea," says Dori. "Still, we see that people like good French or Italian red wine and white wine and we have a lot of Europeans and young people coming in to have drinks."
To research on the food, the couple hit the kitchens of mainly Vietnam, Thailand and HongKong. "Not the touristy places, but the authentic kitchens in the cities and the countryside, the original places, and we got cooks coming from there," says Dori.
"We went to Udon Thani, a city in the northeast of Thailand," says Maritel. "It’s like the Pampanga of Thailand, known for its cooks and great food."
At one point in their Thai research, they rented a restaurant’s kitchen for 15 days where they did all the cooking and conceptualizing. Who ate all the food? Dori nods in Maritel’s direction with a chuckle.
They brought to Manila three Thai cooks who don’t speak a word of English or Filipino. The very global Dori, however, is fluent in Thai and acts as the interpreter between the Thai and the Filipino cooks in training. They also initially imported an entire container of noodles, spices, herbs and other ingredients.
Dori and Maritel are both in love with Thai cuisine, thus it has the biggest number of the hundred-plus noodle dishes of Oodys. Thai cuisine, they say, has the best noodle dishes, having been influenced by other countries. It is also known for its indigenous spices and herbs – lemongrass, tamarind, ginger, basil, turmeric – and from the 16th century Portuguese traders, chili, which figures in almost all of their recipes. And also for its light, healthful cooking. For instance, the word Yam is a popular cooking method that’s basically a kind of salad, which unlike its western counterparts, is low in calorie and fat. It can be a shrimp or pork salad with an abundance of herbs and spices.
"Thai food caters to all palates, from the vegetarians to carnivores. From a diet soup to a rich soup. The soups alone, cooked in all kinds of stock, are so many," says Maritel. "We bring in original noodles from Thailand, and noodles are more or less the same all over Asia, it’s really the ingredients and the way you cook it that makes each dish different."
Noodles have been described as "the most democratic of foods." You can eat them any time and in any fashion – twirl them with a fork or chopsticks without losing your poise or slurp them with "one long noodle hanging down your chin" – and nobody would think less of you.
Noodles are also what connects Asian cuisines. They symbolize a long and fruitful life in many cultures including ours, and quite fittingly, a hundred noodle choices is not a bad place to start.