A fish tale from Pala-pala

Bacolod, the "chicken inasal country," has been adding finer fare to the popular charcoal-roasted fowl on a stick that natives relish with an infernal dip of ketchup, sugared vinegar, soy sauce and crushed red siling labuyo. These new, more "cultured" dining places are speciality restaurants, like the Japanese Inaka, beside Bar 21 on Araneta Avenue, and Kaisei on Lacson street going to Robinsons mall; the Korean KGB (for Koreand grill and barbecue) on 21st street; and Asian Magic, which serves an illusion of Asian dishes, just across the Casino Filipino Hotel in Goldenfields near the airport. But let me tell you what. The natives, and their guests from outside the province or the country still go for the rough and rugged pleasures of the chicken inasal.

But there’s another place in Bacolod for equally rugged gormandizing, offering fish and other seafood instead of chicken, and becoming as popular, maybe even more so, than the old chicken inasal row at the Reclamation. It’s called the Pala-pala, a stone’s throw from the Capitol, back of the fish terminal where on late evenings the harvest of fish loaded on boats coming in from the fishing grounds, especially Hinobaan in the south, through the Banago port, are dumped for distribution to the markets throughout the city and beyond. Here the fish are tossed into heaps by means of a shovel (pala in Ilonggo), hence the name, Pala-pala.

It’s like Manila’s seafood-market restaurants in an outdoor setting and with an ambience that’s best described as "who cares?" Mikey Arroyo does not, nor do Rio and Charlie Cojuangco, Miriam Quiambao, Mon Fernandez, the MBA players, and all the hacenderos of Negros. In this once infamous province of the downtrodden sacadas, Pala-pala is the great equalizer, where those who drive gleaming MBs sit at long tables beside those who drive the rickety trisikad (tricycles run by foot pedals).

Any normal night – meaning, when there are no big conferences or sports events in town to crowd Pala-pala’s tables till dawn – is a good time to sample the Pala-pala delicacies and experience the Bacolod mise-en-scene: a bunch of sugar planters, after a night of losing a year’s earnings, or winning a few thousands, at the Casino Filipino in Greenfields, ending the night with a perfect bowl of steaming lapu-lapu sinigang or whatever soup they wish – magpa-caldo, they call it – side by side with ladies of the night from the Greenfields bars (the Quezon Avenue of Bacolod City) and such other nocturnal creatures, including the young disco crowd and the "parlor girls" in full Revlon maquillage.

During the Panaad Festival in Bacolod City in April, my host, Bambi Borromeo of the office of Governor Joseph G. Maranon, brought a group of us from Manila (you have to be a group to enjoy the feast) to Pala-pala. There were not too many people in Pala-pala this late evening since most everyone else, residents and guests, were in the Panaad Sports Complex where most of Negro’s famous culinary specialties, including Ilog’s incomparably fresh oysters and crabs, were served in the booths. (Ilog is a hundred kilometers away from Bacolod.) The absence of the jostling crowd made our incursion to Pala-pala even more relaxed and memorable.

First, you market the seafood ingredients at the row of stalls lighted by harsh open bulbs or kerosene lamps, offering fresh-from-the-pala-pala and palengke-priced items like black marlin (P160/kilo), yellowfin tuna, lison, gingaw (P180/kilo, ideal for soup), bansa (P120/kilo) bisugo (or logaw), bulaw, lapu-lapu (or inid), lokos (squid), kasag (or alimango), pasayan (P120 per kilo for the shrimp, P250 per kilo for the bigger ones, P300 per kilo for the sugpo or lokon), squid (P80 per kilo), scallops P200/kilo), bihod (roe from inid or ison), crabmeat (P40 per glass, great for crab foo yong). Never mind the faulty translations: they are all great, delectable fiosh! Besides, there’s always the element of surprise: you wouldn’t know what you’d find at that certain day and hour. Scallops, for instance, are not always readily available.

After buying the ingredients, you entrust them to any one of the eateries (or is that cookeries?) near the stalls and you give instructions on how you want them prepared: with caldo, fried, grilled, adobo, kinilaw (raw), sizzling, or whatever. For cooking it the way you like it, they will charge you, including other necessary ingredients and sauces, a fee determined more by gut feel rather than precise mathematics of cost. You’d be surprised: the cost of ingredients and cooking for a full-course dinner for four at Pala-pala would resemble the tab for a light merienda for two in a Makati hotel or in a class hotel in Bacolod.

We recommend you go to Neneng’s for the cooking. For some reason – which may have got nothing to do with the fact that, in some instances of her cooking, Neneng Minosa Aragon, uses Star margarine instead of animal or vegetable oil (in the early days she used no less than butter, but this has become too expensive) – people truly prefer Neneng’s to the others. Even with her "special" touches, Neneng’s charges very reasonably. For instance, for her incomparable fish tinola cooked with batuan (a souring agent from the fruit of an indigenous tree), sili (hot pepper) and sibuyas bisaya (scallions), she charges P40 for half a kilo of the fish or P60 for a kilo. Or for an unforgettable kilaw of tangigue, bansa, tuna or black marlin, tossed with itlog na pula (red eggs), sibuyas Bombay (onions), ginger, kalamansi black beans and mayonnaise, you pay no more than P80 per kilo. Maybe she does it better, maybe she has better PR, but it’s the best place for fresh kinilaw and stir-fried seafood and the caldo that everyone who goes to Pala-pala wait for the evening for.

Neneng is a success story in that district. She used to be for 16 years a waitress in a kapihan, Mila’s Coffee, in the Central Market of Bacolod, working from dawn to night delivering coffee to vendors in their booths in the market and the flighty hawkers on the sidewalks. Today she has three eateries in Pala-pala and probably earning even more than her former boss, Mila Zabala, who remains very proud of her.

But the future is not as rosy as Neneng, and the other operators of the eateries in Pala-pala, would want it to be. There are dark forebodings in the smoke emanating from the gas stoves of Pala-pala. A government plan would have the roads intersecting Pala-pala widened to open up access to the Capitol Park and lure tourists and visitors to its dismal and nondescript lagoon. This will certainly mean relocating Pala-pala elsewhere, "if there indeed is such a plan to relocate it," according to Neneng and the other eater operators, their fingers crossed. Other concerned sectors are stronlgy against relocation, for the sake of the convenience of patrons of Pala-pala and, more importantly, preserving the local color with which Pala-pala has unfailingly enticed foreign and out-of-town guests.

Before any of these dark prospects could happen, experience Pala-pala. For delightfully good food at really, really low prices, it’s the tops. And like the slogan in this City of Smiles, it will keep you smiling – and wanting to come back for more.