Are you being served?

I have recently gone back to the gym for the same reason people who were raised with the right amount of guilt go: I was a slob who made the holidays an excuse to inhale every cheese known to man, every spirit to ever come from any grain, and, of course, a Butterball turkey. I felt guilty for the ancient Roman-ness of it all, and so I signed up at the gym next to my apartment, and even splurged on a trainer just to put the dead animals in my stomach to rest.

I had my fat count (whatever) read, and I was shocked to hear that my fat percentage is 26 percent. My trainer gave me those "eyes" and told me if I wasn’t careful, I’d have a heart attack pronto. Here I was, thinking I was all Nicole Richie skin and bones, when I was what I suspected all along – skin and fat. A flabby stick. I blame that, of course, not only on the holidays but of course on my daily habits. You see, there is something that I love more than shopping and boys – it’s food! There are three temples of dining: fine five-star dining, hole-in-the-walls and fast-foods. My home cooking is merely for survival and not seen as an enjoyment. I’m no foodie or oenophile. I won’t annoy you and tell you what stinkin’ wine goes with what baked carcass of meat. I just love to consume, and gossiping and consuming is, well, very ancient Roman, too, but I don’t feel guilty about it: it’s what I live for.

Considering that I have had my fair share of gastronomic adventures, I can say that the most interesting is fine dining in the Philippines. Eating has become sort of an art, a very competitive game. How many cokehead Michelin-starred chefs are there? Enough to make a small republic. It can also be pretentious. My favorite restaurants are the simple but good ones. Something that has steak with butter, prawns with butter, anything edible with butter, and maybe truffle foam. The hardcore Da Vinci Code-like menus I hate. My personal favorite pretentious food description is eggplant caviar. Talk about the Pearl Harbor-ing of definitions. What the @#$% is that?

Anyway, back to my point. Fine dining in the Philippines may have died when inflation killed the prime rib at Prince Albert Rotisserie. That juicy stump of meat, free from the bells and whistles of nouvelle cuisine, has been there all my life to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and a particularly memorable Valentine’s Day when I was just 12, staring at Kerry and Fred Uytengsu at the next table eating their food and thinking I wanted all the beauty between those two people bottled up for me to take home. Now it’s gone, a total red signal that we are indeed going very third-world armpit level.

People’s idea of fine dining varies. Recently, I was eating in Amber at the new Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong with some friends and again was presented with a menu that resembled a puff piece that some people would submit to me heightened with some curious words from a forgotten lexicon to make it look "deep." After eating foie gras that tasted like rubber and pigeon that tasted like paper, I decided to comfort myself with a good glass of wine, which was being served in delilah-trendy stemless wine glasses… ew, how Crate and Barok. The sommelier gave me a lighted tablet that I could point and press like a Palm Pilot. It was very delilah and I felt as pretentious as the restaurant as I used it. I gave up after 15 minutes and just asked for a vodka tonic. (How very country-club chic.) So, if that was fine dining for them, they could have their electric sommelier back! I guess my standards are not that high: just food to taste the way it should or enhanced in a subtle manner. I want my chicken to taste like chicken and my liver to taste like liver. The tab was also unforgiving. How nouvelle, indeed!

So, back home, I have my choice faves: Gourmand (not exactly fine dining but it’s six stars in my book), Pepato, Tivoli, Prince Albert (even without the prime rib), Japantown, Kaya, Tsukiji, Ben Kay, Filo’s, Old Swiss Inn, Kitchen, McDonalds, and KFC. The idea of a five-star restaurant here is very abstract. My dad once said luxury was eating a prime rib at Prince A wearing slippers and an undershirt. I viewed his take on louche luxe as sort of disturbing, very Mafiosi. However, one can enter a haughty restaurant here in slippers; just say they’re Havaianas. With the ambiance now compromised or rather, crucified, one can only hope that service and food can deliver us from foodie hell.

Of course, it won’t in some cases. In one supposedly chic resto, a server took our orders, after which she said she would repeat our orders. "You ordered scallops in truffle cream cowgirl steak with foiegras butter and seared tuna hold the wasabi," she said in one breathless breath. I wanted to add, "Would you like to supersize it, ma’am, sir?" I mean, look I love junk food at junk prices, but when I’m paying top dollar, I don’t want to suddenly look around and look for fluorescent lights just to feel at home. As if this wasn’t enough, she went back to our table five minutes later and again repeated our orders in the same unpunctuated style. We nodded our heads, already weary, and just as we were about to settle in, she comes back and says that the two items are out of stock. We choose something else, already feeling bratty, and she comes back no fail with her breathtaking flair to report that they did not have those, too. I was tempted to ordered steamed water nestled in a concave glass just to put something in my gut.

So, okay, you have bad service, but you also have over-service. I was in this equally pretentious restaurant and, though I was sure the food was good despite the faux Napa Valley feel, the sommelier was there again to ruin my night. This time, he had actual blood in his veins although I had doubts if he was human. He greeted our group, which is normal for any host in a restaurant, and talked about the specials. After listening to his practiced spiel, we proceeded to slime to the underbelly of polite society and gossip.

The big M (mistake) occurred when a friend of ours asked for a wine recommendation. At first, he gave good advice and worked with bottles in our price range. We liked the bottle and enjoyed our meal, although my steak was trapped in this quadrant plate with small partitions that held the veggies, mushrooms, mashed potatoes, and steak, which made it impossible to cut. I wasn’t sure if our wine expert was just drunk or plain annoying, but he kept on coming back to our table, bringing leftover bottles from other people for us to try. He kept interrupting our juicefest, and unlike him, we tried to be polite and listened as he blabbed on. Before I knew it, my uncuttable steak was cold. We ordered another bottle of wine; this time it was yuck. He asked us how it was. My other male friend and I said it sucked. He gave my male friend another glass of wine on the house but none for me. It was sexist in fake Napa Valley. We decided that even though the food was good, despite the non-ergonomic tableware, we would think twice about going back, all because of the stalker sommelier.

I told my friend what happened in that particular restaurant and he said while he was at a business lunch there, the stalker sommelier actually pulled up a chair and joined them. It was too sweet for dessert. The food is also a wild card. Sometimes it tasted like it was microwaved, sometimes it tasted like it was left out to chill for the day. There are good ones that make food taste like food and not like a Damien Hirst statement. Sometimes, people just want to kill their food, like the logic behind ordering well-done foie gras or Wagyu steak. Why not just have a burger McCharlie Manson?

So, there you have it. Words on food by someone who has been accused more often than not of being anorexic. I’m not bitchy, just hungry.