I finally got into a kitchen this week! Two different ones! On Monday I got to work in my niece’s restaurant, Conrado’s. I’ve talked about it before, but it’s this quiet, cute, 25 seater diner right above their family’s nail salon, in the middle of the busy market. None of the hustle and bustle seeps into the place. There’s wood floors, light-weight metal patio furniture for tables & seating, potted succulents, dangling light fixtures, framed portraits of our family members, and gaudy but cute melted glass decorations hung up. It has a bunch of chalkboard quotes that you’d probably see on a 17-year-olds pinterest homepage. Matter fact, most of this is rather pinterest-y. But that’s not a knock, it’s cute, and most importantly: it’s clean and air conditioned. Both rarities here, believe me, and to have both? 5 stars. Kristel has an acoustic Filipino folk-song playlist on repeat. Think, Bahay Kubo and the like, played on a soothing Spanish guitar. She serves all day breakfast and these gigantic pandesal sandwiches the size of a child’s head. And while it’s not the culinary work that I thought I’d get into, work is work. I’m gonna make this french toast. Yaherd? Things move slow mostly in the morning, a few orders of pancakes and pandesal french toast. A few ‘silogs are slung, and a maniac orders alfredo at 10am. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad alfredo, but it is 10am. Anyway 1:30 rolls around and orders come to a dead stop. We don’t get anyone in the door for an hour. I ask Kristel if this is normal for them and she says yeah she usually watches a movie or plays with the little baby that belongs to one of the workers downstairs. We get maybe 2 sandwich orders in the next 3 hours but for the most part, a pinoy movie is in the que. So we watch a flick on YouTube. Some rom-com with Sharon Cuneta falling back in love in her 50’s or whatever. It’s funny I guess. Kristel asks me about my love life and I tell her I don’t have one right now lol. She presses me for details and as I’m about to give in and tell her, she cuts me off and says “Your dad told us everything! Hahaha! He was crying and telling us to take care of you! Hahaha!” I’m laughing but taken aback to one thing in particular. “He was crying?...like crying, crying?” I ask. She says yeah, “One day he called us, I guess it was after you made up your mind to come over here and was saying that you’re so hurt and that you don’t know what you’re doing with your life.” Naturally defensive, I fire back that i’m good, that I haven’t felt like that in a while, that we’re friends now/she isn’t to blame as to why I’m here, and that I do kinda know what I’m doing with my life sorta, but I’m really kinda shocked still that my dad...cared. Through tears, called my relatives to take care of me in an emotional capacity that he believed he could not. I’m sure he would’ve done fine if he tried. I felt hope and disappointment kinda all in one. I wanna do better. I tell her some half-drawn sparknotes version of my romantic life and she does hers. It’s a nice bonding moment. By this time it's 3:30-4 and no one is eating in the restaurant. So Kristel send me and her only other employee, CJ, out to the palengke to grab groceries for the store. Out the door with list in hand and 500 pesos in her pocket. Time to make magic happen. CJ was so quick on her feet it was hard to keep up. Weaving through stands of vegetables, dodging hanging clothing items, correctly predicting every direction people were walking while looking at their cells, she was masterful. Everything she did was efficient, but charming still. She was like a studio Ghibli character come to life. Tastes a grape, squeezes a mangosteen, makes a face at a baby, takes a sharp left, selects the vegetables, haggles the grocer, pets the cat that's always sleeping at the light bulb stand, it was fun to witness. We get back to Conrado’s in no more than 30 minutes and unpack. Just in time too, after a few games of cards we get a last minute rush and are on our feet until close at 7pm. Everyone loves Kristel’s sandwiches, I think it’s the size and quality of the pandesal. It’s sweet but not overly so, and chewy but not heavy. Also did I say that it was the size of a child’s head? For like 200 pesos (4 dollars) what a bargain. That was the template and timeline of pretty much every day I spent there, (which was only 3 this week but I’m expecting to be there a lot more this month haha)
Ate Oya (Oyo’s older sister, convenient, I know) finally took me to her new restaurant, Casa Carmen Cafe. They soft opened in June and are planning a grand opening in November. It’s a gutted out traditional bahay kubo house with original elevated skeleton, the exposed wood beams, and refurbished exterior; complete with the sliding capiz windows. It’s a little more upscale and twice as big as Conrado’s, but simple and elegant nonetheless. She Introduced me to the staff and the other co-owners. They’re five cooks in the back, five servers, and six owners. All really friendly people and excited to have a free set of hands. Casa also does food to order, but they do Filipino food instead of breakfast and pasta. They make some of the best regional dishes I have ever had in my life. Dishes like Kansi, which is a Iloilo regional beef and jackfruit soup. It’s made sour with the batwan fruit -- which is native only to western Visayas -- instead of tamarind, sampalok, or vinegar. It’s tart like sinigang but has a deeper savoriness and more dimension due to lemongrass and asuete. Suman sa Gata at Manok which according to one of the cooks, says is a super specific Cavite specialty; a sticky rice cake cooked in coconut milk and then steamed with a sliver of chicken on top. They also put spins on classics without losing the heart of the dish. Things like crispy dinuguan and fried halo-halo. They had me finishing and plating dishes first day. Finishing final grill items, wiping edges, garnishing plates, my hands felt alive, useful in a way that I can only compare to making art. It was surreal to be in a kitchen like that, and to be cooking and serving food that I've worked my whole life around. It really brought a prestige to Pinoy cuisine that I've only ever seen in Instagram photos. To see very humble stews and barbecued meats elevated to this level, at this capacity really brought me hope that I could do something like this someday myself. What was surprising was while all this gorgeous food was around them, the most excited the kitchen got was when Kim; the heaviest of the line cooks bought really crappy pizza with the promise of drinking beer later on that night. Which was so hilarious, and comforting to me. They tell me next week, i’m prepping pata and learning their dinuguan recipe. Word.
On Friday my birthday happened, I shared it with my cousin Lou! He however was turning 50 lol. And before you think this is gonna be all island boy vibes and noodles, think again. It starts with a cat. 5 hurricane and ends with a very unpleasant argument with my mom. There are noodles still. So that’s good. As the day was happening I was angs- y from the two different super storms planning to DDT my whole life and not being able to gather all the family I wanted to see because of them. I ended up a touch frumpy most of they day. For some context, with Oyo now gone I didn’t really have a mode of transportation the whole past week. Mom didn’t believe I could drive by myself here. She didn’t know I drove his sisters car last week and was thriving in this type of balls out driving culture. Yeesh, and God forbid I take a tricycle by myself and get kidnapped?...I don’t know, I’m a clear half foot taller than most of the people here, in the best-ish shape of my life, and I don’t want to brag, but can throw a decent punch. I don’t know. So this whole past week I was at the mercy of my mom taking me places. Dropping me off to either of my nieces that owned restaurants, which was clearly awesome. But when I wasn’t working and being checked on constantly I was stuck by her side running errands or fixing the up the apartment in San Carlos. I felt like a preteen again. On top of that, there were things I wasn't giddy to do like: being drug to 6am mass, (rough) she then told me to order then cancel catering, (twice??¿?) and the city had erratic brownouts for 15 hours. All of which making me feel a bit—powerless. So after mass (which I mostly slept though) I was stuck at the house with nothing to do on my birthday, and no one was coming over hahaha. It’s a peculiar kind of “kick-in-the-groin” paradox when you’re not trying to make a day all about you because it makes you feel cringey and childish, but in doing so you end up trying to please yourself anyway by not feeling those things. After some alone time filming ants and laughing at myself I decided to interact with people. Tatay and I feed chickens and I tried having a comprehensive conversation with him to no avail, oh well. He end up telling me he had to get me goats. Like a switch flipped in his mind and he wouldn’t rest until is original programming was complete type of vibe. I didn’t want to fight him on it, and so about an hour later he comes back with two goats, a mom and a kid. He made me name them, THEN told me we were gonna kill them later. Cool. That’s cool. Couldn’t really sway him, being stubborn is his worst and best trait. My mom ended up taking them down the street to some relatives to take care of them and told tatay that they were too small to kill and eat anyway. Good going mom. I went inside and started looking at old photos with inay. She had stories for almost every person and photo we looked at. That was beautiful. All of my mom siblings are really brave, but especially my mom. Hearing first hand accounts of her young adult years was assuring. A few hours later I got wind that everyone at home was a-ok. What a relief. I took a step back from the lack of command I had going into the day and laughed at the parallel it had with my whole past year. I can toil and strive and work with what I got, the best that I can, but at the end of the day, things are gonna keep on turning beyond my control. I get gratification of autonomy with what I do yet the assurance of things moving forward without me. What a rad gift. Power got back on about 6pm -ish and we decided to head out to kuya Lou’s house to celebrate together because they also had power back on. We ended up having pancit and spaghetti. Noodles for long life or whatever. We ended up hobo drinking beer and a handle of jack. I had some pretty good conversations about dreams and goals with some of my cousins and got to know each other better. My one nephew JR is an aspiring historian and we talked about Philippine history for a pretty long time. That was really exciting for me, he knew so much and I don’t usually have anyone to gab about that kinda stuff or even ask questions from. At around 9 when it was dark two of my pamangkin shut off the all the lights to fake a brownout. They ended up walking out with 2 lit birthday cupcakes. It was really sweet of them, too bad I didn’t take any pictures. Live in the moment and what not right? I ended up having to go home early that night because my mom’s foot was acting up and after a few sharp looks shot my way I could tell she wasn’t feeling comfortable. I told her to go home by herself and that I’d get a ride back to the bukid somehow. She sternly said no and I resigned my pride to argue in front of family, I could tell she was more uncomfortable seeing me drink that much with my cousins than the pain in her foot. On the drive back home I argued about the lack of freedom I was feeling with her and the juxtaposition of her own life around my age. I think I nailed my talking points. She ended up seeing my side of things and we apologized to each other. I think the pressure is getting to her from both sides, of being a child again living with her folk and remembering to be a mom. I doubt it’ll be the last time I talk about this dynamic. I do hope it gets better soon.
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