Irish cream of the crop

We had great craic when we interviewed executive chef Brian Farrell of Westin Philippine Plaza Hotel. He thought we were slagging him or maybe we were eejits or headers or even fluthered when we said that some Filipinos nail themselves to the cross during Holy Week. (Craic is slang for fun, slagging is making fun of someone, eejits is idiots, headers is mentally unstable persons and fluthered is drunk. That, my friends, is as far as my research into Irish slang goes.)

He said, "You’re winding me up, right?"

We said, "No we’re not. Sometimes, even the relatives of the penitent join in lashing his back."

Thirty-year-old Brian is from Ireland, of course – land of the Cranberries, guinness, leprechauns if you believe fairy tales, St. Patrick if you need to borrow a reason to get soused and the Blarney Stone (if you kiss it, you get the gift of gab or according to Brian, the "ability to bullshit your way out of anything") – and a country that has "remarkably ordinary food. Like the Philippines, which has nice food but not very well known internationally."

"Irish food is not like French cuisine, which is very fine and sophisticated. Our food is very much homestyle cooking because of where we’re located in the world," Brian said. "The weather is very bad, it’s always cold, a lot of rain, so most of our food is heavy like stew."

When he was growing up in Dublin, there was only one restaurant where you could go to eat Irish food. "We’re not world renowned for our food, but what’s happened over the last couple of years is that Ireland’s economy has been booming and the Irish pub scene has traveled around the world, especially in Asia where this image of Ireland and the Irish as fun to be with has been built up."

A few years ago, he went home to Dublin and was surprised to find a lot more fine-dining Irish restaurants. "Now they’re using Irish ingredients and cooking traditional dishes and giving them a twist. It’s wonderful."

Brian has the looks of a guy barely out of culinary school. Oh, all right, he looks like a boy band member, according to a certain Westin PR person! Or like somebody from the Irish Tatler’s party page. But don’t be fooled by his youthful good looks because this chef has many years of experience behind him. Besides, he’s Westin’s youngest executive chef in the hotel’s 27-year history.

He grew up with parents that loved to cook, especially his father who would spend all his time off from work in the kitchen cooking Chinese dishes learned from cookbooks. That was back in those days, about 20 years ago, when Asian food hadn’t crossed the continent yet, when asking someone to share a spring roll with you to balance her yin would probably get you a slap on the face.

His dad would go to specialty stores in Dublin and bring home Chinese ingredients, some of which were unheard of by most people. "I got my love of food from my dad," Brian said. "He had a real cooking hobby. He worked for a newspaper in Ireland and after he retired he did one year in a chefs’ training school and became a chef at 50."

When Brian was younger, he would also try his hand in cooking but he didn’t really think he would end up as a professional. But in his final year in school, when it was time to decide what he would do for the rest of his life, he decided he’d try professional cooking. So he took up hotel and tourism courses, giving him a headstart when he entered a professional chefs school in Dublin.

"Being a chef is one of those jobs where you can travel as well," Brian explained the appeal of the profession. "When I would go to the interviews whether for a job or for a college and I’d be asked why I wanted to be a chef, I would always say, ‘I hope to travel.’ Deep inside I’d think, why did I say that?"

He has done a lot of traveling since he left school. He moved to London where he did his early training in restaurants, then to Sheraton Hotel in Heathrow. Then he was off to Nanjing in China and then to the Republic of Georgia (formerly part of the Soviet Union). This partly explains why his Irish accent is not so pronounced.

Brian laughed and said, "I haven’t really been surrounded by the Irish voice. The Irish tend to speak very fast and we have a lot of slang expressions like any other language. In China and Georgia, I had to speak slowly so they would understand or I had to learn the language."

So what is the first word a chef has to learn to get by in the kitchen? Brian paused and said, "Hello." In Georgian, it’s a little more complicated than that. Written in their unique alphabet, it’s pronounced "gamarjoba." He laughed and said, "When I first heard the word I thought it was a dirty word. Or something out of Star Wars like Chewbacca."

Now that he’s been in Manila for five months, has he made progress with Tagalog? "This is the first foreign country that I’ve worked in where people speak English. I have to be honest. I don’t think I’m probably not going to learn Tagalog because I don’t have to."

Between working and traveling and earning his first chef’s assignment, he got married to his French wife Elsa, also a hotelier who worked as assistant F&B director in their previous postings.

We met Brian Farrell a week before Holy Week when the hotel was in the thick of preparations for the busy days ahead. In a land where the Easter break used to be synonymous with going to Hong Kong with empty suitcases and coming back filled to bursting with Mongkok knockoffs, nothing like an infectious disease can make you stay in good old Manila.

Anyway, on Good Friday, my husband and I were at the Sunset Bar of Westin, drinking and watching the sunset over the bay. Later we passed by the poolside barbecue area. Brian Farrell, executive chef in charge of the hotel’s nine food outlets, was right there, his sleeves rolled up literally and sweating in the humid twilight – nagba-barbecue! Later, when we had dinner at the Italian restaurant Al Fiere, we spotted Brian working by the pizza oven ("A proper dome-shaped Italian oven," boasted Brian).

"No rest for us at the hotel," he told us.

"No rest for the wicked?" we joked.

As executive chef, Brian heads an 89-chef/line-cook team and is in charge of the menu of each hotel outlet: Al Fiere, whose antipasti buffet he just upgraded (they’re importing more Italian ingredients and cheeses now); China Sea restaurant; Treasure Island, which is currently being refurbished; Sunset Bar, which serves tropical drinks and cocktails; Café Plaza coffee shop, which serves an international buffet; Siete Pecados, Sports Bar and Live Concert Venue and Dance Club, all of which serve bar chow and drinks; and the Lobby Lounge.

"That’s the challenge of working in a hotel, especially a big hotel," he said. "When I arrived here at the beginning of November, we were doing an average of 3,000 to 3,500 people a day banquets, averaging 54 a month. I came from a hotel with 210 rooms; we have 609 rooms in Manila. It was a busy time of the year to start, but I’ve got a good, hardworking team. Some days we were doing four to five weddings." Then he added with a smile, "I noticed though that the weddings here tend to be very formal."

On top of the banqueting are Brian’s responsibilities in improving the outlets. "We’re doing it one at a time," he said. "When the renovation of Treasure Island is completed, we’ll have an open kitchen in the middle of the pool. Our buffet here is temporary; we’re building a permanent buffet over the island. During the day you can sit by the pool or by the open kitchen. The setting here is very nice, it’ll be fun to have some bit of live cooking. At the moment it’s just barbecue, but when we open you can order barbecue a la carte or sandwiches, salads and some light snacks."

The pool area of Westin lends the hotel a resort ambience, giving you an I’m-away-from-the-city-thank-god feeling because all you see is the bay.

When Brian first arrived in Manila, the only way for him to learn the local food scene was to go to the happening places such as Malate and Makati, and to talk with people in the food business. "There’s a lot going on in the Manila food scene, locals are very open to all types of food. A lot of Filipinos are well traveled. You talk about Italian food, Arabic food, they tend to know these cuisines or are willing to try them. In Georgia that wasn’t the case at all. All they wanted to eat was Georgian food, which has a lot of unique dishes, too." How about Filipino food? He has tried kare-kare and adobo, both of which are "nice."

As for innovating Filipino food, Brian says he’ll leave that to the Filipino chefs. "I’ve tried to innovate local dishes in other countries, but then the diehards would look for the old way."

We still hope he’s going to do something new to old Filipino favorites. As long as he doesn’t take away the bagoong out of the kare-kare, he’ll do all right.