Food makers

Restaurant-hopping is an exciting experience, as food lovers will attest. In each place they find something pleasant, something new, something unexpected. Restaurants may serve the same dishes – pastas and casseroles and salads – but there’s always something different in the way the dishes taste, smell and look. But the real difference is the owners of the place, and their stories on how they started out in the food business are colorful and fun, sometimes accidental, sometimes the fruition of a dream entertained from childhood.

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There’s Cafe Mischka, on the ground floor of Alfredo’s Steakhouse in Quezon City along Morato avenue. The place was conceived even when one of the owners, Yaki Ludan, was a small girl puttering in her mother’s kitchen, but born only August last year. Yaki’s husband is Dr. Arturo Ludan, and he and 10 friends and relatives decided to pool resources and recipes and put up the cafe which turned out to do good business despite the hard times all around. One reason for the good daily turn-out may be the native breakfasts offered at relatively low prices, like longanisa with eggs, boneless bangus with eggs and achara, pork tocino with eggs, rice and brewed coffee.

Diners’ favorites are the Pinoy Pasta creations, such as the Aglio Olio Tuyo (consisting of tuyo flakes and olive oil sauce), Tinapa Tetrazzini (tinapa flakes in creamy Parmesan sauce), Bagnet Rice with Scrambled Egg and Pork Cracklings, Callos and Bangus Belly Amandine. There are the Tuna Steak a la Pobre, and Aligue Rice with Seafoods Coconut Cream. When we had supper there, we tried the tinapa flakes, found the Caesar Salad different from most of what we’ve had in other places, and the Tofu with Washabi Sauce delightful.

The 12 partner-owners get together from time to time to try and test recipes. Most of the recipes are from Yaki’s treasured heirloom cookbook. Yaki says the cafe is named after her granddaughter Mika, who is showing signs of becoming a gourmet chef. Yaki’s daughter bakes the carrot cake, a favorite from among the cafe’s desserts which by the way include fat-free ice cream.

Cafe Mischka has yet another boon - in the person of Norman Tamayo, the chef, who makes sure every dish passes high quality standards. He knows whereof he speaks, having worked and lived in the United States for 11 years, most of them spent dining in superb restaurants in New York, and testing them in his apartment kitchen. The night we dined at the café, young executive-looking diners steamed into the dainty place, and a couple reserved the whole cafe (w/c seats about 60 persons) for a wedding reception. The couple said they had their first date at the café, and decided to tie the knot there, and because, according to the bride, "We like the food, and the ambience."

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Kiss the Cook is not a restaurant, but those who are lucky to be invited to large parties (like 750 persons) or intimate dinners (for 12 persons in tuxedoes and long gowns) prepared by the Araos sisters, you want to kiss the cooks, Waya Valencerina Araos and Roja. The sisters never had any formal training in cooking, and learning to eat the best and the finest from food prepared by their father, the legendary and comic sculptor Jerry Araos and mother, medical practitioner Melen. Since they were small, they had caviar and cheeses, amaretto and wines and liquors, mushroom soup with truffle oil and foie gras, the best favada and mechado (which uses meat from the neck or batok of a cow), and molo soup perfected from their Ilonggo yaya. They developed a taste for the exotic frog’s legs, adobong bayawak, fried crickets, adobong salagubang, snake, ginataang pating, pawikan eggs and pagi (stingray). They had fresh herbs, fresh tomatoes and never canned tomato sauces or monosodium glutamate. The recipes above are made by the sisters when diners ask for them.

Otherwise the Kiss the Cook chefs prepare French and Italian, Chinese and Thai food in splendid table settings, using the finest of linens, fresh flowers (from the Dangwa bus terminal), and chinaware collected by their father during his trips abroad. They told a writer that cooking for 30 people is "a breeze, it’s like cooking a regular dinner at home."

Their introduction to the catering business was made when Charlie Rufino, a senior executive of Fort Bonifacio Development Corporation, tasted the gastronomic spread prepared by Waya, 29, at her father’s gardens in Antipolo, and asked her to cater at his Rotary Club meeting at the Global City. From that happy experience, Waya joined by sister Roja, 23, has been catering for the Rotary Club of Makati-Saledo, Rizal-West and New Manila-East, and the monthly cocktails of the Punongbayan and Araullo auditing firm at the Enterprise Center in Makati City. On call anytime to socialities and businessmen who want intimate dinners, they personally attend the receptions to make sure everything is 100 percent okay, from the food and wines served to the behavior of waiters they trained themselves. Recognizing their value as gourmet chefs, the sisters charge P1,800 per cover, and the customers don’t mind, knowing that they enjoy partaking of what they pay for.