Hail to the chef

When Kai chef Gilbert Pangilinan once catered for a dinner party, one of the guests commented, "Your food tastes like it’s cooked with so much love."

Well, Gilbert is not the kind of guy that conjures dramatic images of Tita and her paramour from Like Water for Chocolate. It’s not that kind of love – at least not to our knowledge. But, yes, he does what he does with a lot of love – love of cooking, eating, experimenting in the kitchen, thinking out of the box (or should it be basket?), and love of seeing his diners enjoying his food.

So for Valentine’s Day Gilbert is cooking up a special feast for lovers at Kai restaurant in Greenbelt 2, Makati. The set dinner, priced at P1,900+ per head, will be offered only for two days, February 14 and 15.

The Valentine dinner starts with seared Kobe beef with yuzu sauce, followed by miso-glazed foie gras served with a mix of greens and dalandan dressing, and grilled lobster tail with red pepper compound butter served with banana fried rice and yuzu-shisho hollandaise. An apple sampaguita sorbet is served after this to prepare the palate for the main course – pan-roasted duck magret with chestnuts, rhubarb yamamomo sauce and caramelized pear. Next is asari saka mushi or clam broth with a hint of sake.

Gilbert explains that in Japanese kaiseki, which consists of about a dozen plus courses, the soup really comes at the end. "It’s for cleansing the palate, the way tea does."

So after the clam broth comes the dessert: Banana Nutella harumaki with green tea ice cream and Valrhona truffles rolled in almonds and dusted with green tea.

The set dinner comes with wine supplied by Wine Direct, and diners can choose between Brookland Valley, Margaret River, Verse 1 merlot and Grand Burge Frontignac’s Late Harvest muscat.

Even if it’s not Valentine’s Day, you can be sure that the restaurant’s ambiance is romantic and very cozy what with the interiors designed by architect Anna Sy and the flower arrangements by Tina Maristela-Ocampo. Something must be said about Tina’s flowers: They’re always unique. At a sampling dinner last week that Kai owners Ricco Ocampo and Rikki Dee hosted for their colleagues in the Young Presidents Organization (YPO), the large table was dressed up with a simple white cloth, candles and lots of short-stemmed flowers contained in cored apples – yup, very red apples used as vases.

Gilbert first came up with the idea of using apples when he was eating in a restaurant in Australia and he was served his potato salad inside an apple. So for a party that Kai catered for a Movement 8 event, he served lechon stuffed into cored apples topped with traditional lechon or hoisin sauce. Designer Budji Layug of Movement 8 immediately christened the dish "The revenge of the apple."

It’s things like this that makes Gilbert look forward to catering for different parties. "Ricco and Rikki always challenge me to do something new with every catering. I give them a menu and then they’d say, ‘What else can we do?’"

For Ricco’s party, he concocted Kobe foie gras burgers, which proved to be such a hit that the mini burgers with apple sauce would not make it to the buffet table on a full platter because guests just loved them. "We served the Kobe burgers at Kai for a while, but it was very expensive because we were using Kobe beef. It cost P800." For one of Rikki’s parties, he created a totally modern Chinese menu. "Rikki gave me the flavor profiles and we developed the menu for three months. We did a lot of duck and roast pork served like pritchon and guests had a choice of having it with pita, pandesal or cuapao."

His love of and early exposure to fine food and travels around the world has led Gilbert Pangilinan to where he is today, thanks to his entrepreneur parents who took his education outside the school seriously.

His mother, Grace Pangilinan, belongs to the Ocampo business clan of Pampanga. She and her husband Zoilo Pangilinan met in med school and then practiced for a few years in the US and came back to the Philippines to continue the Ocampo patriarch’s business.

"They said they chose business because in the province, patients pay their medical bills with chickens," Gilbert relates with a laugh.

The Ocampos may hold the ideal model for business families. The patriarch started it and handed it down to his children who were to locate their own retail stores in different parts of Luzon to avoid squabbles, an arrangement still observed by the third-generation Ocampos.

Because Ocampo’s sold jewelry, appliances and other things, the perks that came with it were mostly travels. "With appliance manufacturers, they give you quotas, for instance you sell a million pesos worth of TVs and they send you to the US. So I would travel with my cousins – Louie O. Gutierrez (of Silverworks), Dita Ocampo Florendo (of Ocampo’s Jewelry in Glorietta) and I went to China together."

Gilbert remembers going around Paris, London, and being lost in Amsterdam. At a young age, Gilbert says, he would stay with his family in five-star hotels and eat in fine-dining restaurants. When he was in grade school and high school, he would often miss his classes to go abroad. At 12, he got hooked on bonsai and traveled to Japan to exhibit his collection where he was promptly featured in Japanese newspapers as the youngest bonsai enthusiast of the exhibit. Alas, in second-year high school, he fell in love, had a girlfriend, and that was pretty much the end of the hobby. "But that’s where I learned how to plate, because the principles of bonsai are the same – layering."

In their Dasmariñas Village home, Gilbert grew up with a brood of 10, which proved to have advantages (you could disappear in the crowd) and disadvantages (you had to wait your turn). Of the 10 siblings, only two are still involved in the family business, but at one point five of them studied gemology at the Gemological Institute of America, while Gilbert and two of his sisters, Gina and Geraldine, studied at the Culinary Institute of America with Gilbert earning an associate’s degree.

His parents would send the kids for post-graduate studies in the US after they earned their undergrad degrees here. For Gilbert, it didn’t exactly come on a silver platter – he had to prove to his mom that he was serious in pursuing a culinary career after he had earned his Entrepreneurial Management degree from CRC. He apprenticed at Edsa Shangri-La Hotel and at Tagayatay Highlands, which was then run by chef Gene Gonzales’ group. Highlands had 22 kitchens and Gilbert worked there without pay, just to learn the ropes. After a year, his mom said yes and he enrolled at CIA in New York.

One of the most difficult jobs he ever had was working at the Savoy in London. "We had a restaurant and a banquet serving a thousand guests. We were 50 in the kitchen under a German sous chef and we worked at both the banquet and restaurant simultaneously. When there was a function in the banquet, we’d go up to cook for the thousand guests, then come down to the restaurant again. We were in a room oven with burners in it, plating the food, and a hundred waiters would come in to get them and serve them to guests. Then there was a refrigerator room for the desserts. You were going from hot to cold (hence the toque and gloves), from the banquet to the restaurant in one night."

What did Gilbert learn from the experience? "Our chef used to tell us: ‘What you can do with one plate you can do with 2,000 plates.’ That’s what I do now for catering, kahit gaano kahirap, it’s worth it and it’s feasible. It can be done."

In New York, Gilbert worked for Nobu restaurant and later realized that he wanted to open his own restaurant – a dream he had held in his heart even when he was still studying. So he came home to the Philippines and opened Sticks Japanese Bistro, a casual-dining restaurant that gives classic Japanese dishes an unexpected twist, at Robinsons Star Mills in Pampanga, and later at Robinsons Galleria in Ortigas. While the food is very, very good, Sticks sticks to reasonable prices with an average of P150 to P250.

Shortly after he established Sticks, Gilbert teamed up with his cousin Ricco Ocampo, Rikki Dee, Doris Magsaysay Ho and his fellow Pinoy chefs who worked at Nobu and they opened the neo-Japanese restaurant Kai at Greenbelt 2, Ayala Center.

Today, Gilbert has cooked for so many occasions it’s hard for him to pick a favorite. There was that dinner in a building’s penthouse for a couple, a lunch by the beach in Batangas, a mega event on a farm in Zambales, a picnic on Corregidor island.

So how does Gilbert come up with these ideas? He drives and takes a walk to clear his head. "I drive to Tagaytay and ideas just come to me. Or sometimes I walk around the subdivision for an hour at night after work."

As much as he loves to experiment, Gilbert’s genius also lies in the fact that he knows when not to. There are some untouchable dishes that no great chef would dare mess with. "Like Peking duck, you don’t touch the sauce profiles. Even in Japanese cooking, you don’t change the teriyaki sauce. I’ve been wanting to use truffle oil for one Chinese soup, but Rikki Dee said masisira yung flavor."

It’s not just the food that Gilbert is very detail-oriented about. He also keeps an eagle eye on the kind of service Kai Catering provides. For a party hosted by businesswoman Doris Ho and SGV founder Washington SyCip in honor of former US Ambassador to the Philippines Thomas Hubbard last month, Gilbert just stopped short being an OC by our standards. He and his staff called up the guests one by one and asked them to choose from the main dishes and, for those who chose steaks, how they would like it cooked. Then weeks before the party, they asked the hosts to give them a copy of the seating arrangement. So at the party, for which they also served heavy cocktails during the program, the waiters knew exactly what to give to the guests without asking them when they sat down for dinner.

It was how Gilbert had planned it – service without being intrusive, no irritating waiter asking the guests what they would like while they were in the middle of a conversation.

"Some of the guests were surprised when we made the calls. When I went to attend a wedding in the States, the hotel called me up and asked me to choose from the set menu and I thought, why not do it here, it’s extra service that we can provide."

And at the end of it, when he was introduced and all the guests clapped, Gilbert felt it was all worth it. "Pampa-tanggal ng pagod." 

Well, you know what they say: You’re the luckiest person in the world when you love your work.

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Kai’s Valentine’s Day menu is available on February 14 and 15. For reservations and inquiries, call 757-5209/10.