The Wily Filipino

Items May Have Shifted During Flight.

(The photo of kare-kare above is actually taken from Kamayan sa Palaisdaan, in Los Banos, Laguna; it's the yummy mess in the upper left-hand corner that's under discussion below.)

It's been a great week for me in terms of Filipino food. Last week I was the lucky beneficiary of a delicious estofado a la poeta (props to the guinataan too), which was accompanied not only by late, if minor, Kurosawa (with analysis both high and low, the latter to which I mostly contributed) but a conversation about Filipino cuisine.

(I actually have the transcript of a lunch conversation I had at Market Market, somewhere in my files around here, which I should really post some time, with Tita Cely Kalaw, the proprietor of the legendary Bamboo Grove, and the naming of Bicol Express, and her dream of restaurants specializing in quickly-disappearing provincial cuisine, using only ingredients from those provinces.)

But all this was preceded by a dinner earlier that week with my new friend The Llawyer at Palencia, a relatively new Filipino restaurant in San Francisco (in the Castro) that friends have been raving about. Funny, though, how the food -- and this "review", for that matter -- ended up revolving around the bagoong, which was served with the kare-kare.

Bagoong, for those of you not familiar with it, is what happens when you take ground-up shrimp or krill and let it rot and dry it out in the sun, then you take the whole salty mess, and mash or grind it until it's smooth. It smells exactly as it sounds; needless to say, the taste is absolutely unique (and no, belacan and terasi just don't quite cut it).

The kare-kare arrived, but the bagoong -- we shrimp-allergic eaters very gingerly scooped the bagoong onto the side of the plate, then realized we were being too careful -- was, to put it mildly, off. It just wasn't right. But it was off in an interesting way: it wasn't that it was bland, but that there was something else, something added (anise?) or subtracted. We couldn't tell what it was, but something was clear: a substitution had been made.

This was doubtless a concession to the western palate, unused to the unsettling alien pungency redolent of deep churning fathoms and sundried decay. But that was the whole point of bagoong: You were supposed to be able to smell it once Mom opens the jar from the fridge. No, to hell with that -- before you take it out of the fridge. (Thus accounting for the greater consumption of baking soda in Southeast Asian households in the United States. I'm just kidding about that last bit.) No active sniffing was required; bagoong needed a precise calibration of stink, a concoction of funk and ferment that could only be accurately confirmed by comparison with what Nanay or Lola or Tita used, even it was from a glass jar.

And this is, I suppose, the problem with first-generation immigrant cuisine, as the standards will always be impossibly high. These criteria are so inextricable from the exacting standards of sentiment and memory, that any restaurant-created Filipino meal almost demands nothing less but absolute fidelity to the food made by the older maternal women in our lives. That makes us -- those of the first and second immigrant generations -- the hardest to please. No chef in a white apron could stand against the might of an elder woman in a frayed housedress.

In my interviews with Daly City immigrants, the thing they missed most from the Philippines was, surprisingly, not food. It was the unhurried quality of life in the Philippines, the intimate way in which people could relax with friends or neighbors after work, or have weekends free. (No doubt that for some, this was also facilitated by maids and/or an extended family, but you folks know what I mean.)

But food would always be mentioned next, though qualified almost instantly by "Marami ring Pilipino food dito, pero hindi pareho, eh." [There's lots of Filipino food here, but it's not the same.] And when asked what the difference was, they answered that it wasn't just the way things tasted in restaurants, but some ineffable quality to the food perhaps related to the sentimental reasons described above. I suspect it ultimately had to do with who was doing the cooking.

And because of this, despite the agents of globalization -- importers, the distributors at Ranch 99, your Tita who managed to sneak in that bottle of alamang through customs at SFO -- Filipino immigrant cuisine is perhaps fated to labor, heroically and creatively, as an inexact copy.

The Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer, back in 1688, began to notice a mysterious malady afflicting young Swiss nationals returning from overseas. He called the new disease "nostalgia", using a precise Greek nostos, or "to come home", and algos, or "pain", "to define the sad mood originating from the desire for the return to one's native land".

Hofer's theories didn't quite work; he figured that the source of all the melancholy and insomnia had to do with "the quite continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibers of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still cling." (Consequently, the paths through which those animal spirits walk are enlarged through constant use, therefore accounting for daydreams.)

Harebrained, maybe. But I like how nostalgia, despite its ordinary usage nowadays, is, etymologically, a disease at its roots, and so is its companion disorder, homesickness. When it comes to Filipino food, like Proust's shell-shaped cookie, a mere bite collapses time and space in a single act. Perhaps, then, our taste buds are perpetually afflicted with nostalgia and homesickness, an accompanying medical condition of the immigrant experience.

Other than food, music is the other medium most evocative of nostalgia, similarly dissolving temporal and spatial distance. But there is also something similar to food, in the manner in which we listen to "imperfect" music. Like a needle skipping over scratched vinyl, our ears compensate for the gaps of song, filling in what's missing.

Perhaps our palates work the same way. We adjust and readjust, slowly, realizing that things are not quite the same, that something is off, and our tastes learn to shift by themselves, along with the sometimes sorrowful awareness that the flavors will never be quite right, or never be quite like what we remembered, that, despite the attempts at creating something new, like the bagoong at Palencia, or our new lives in new places, imperfect improvisations will simply have to be made.

We have all lost something in the passage, and sometimes we carry with us baggage better left behind. But food, and its memory, is particularly tenacious in its survival; nothing else immediately summons up the rawness of emotions as food does. And this is why the reaction is immediate when the flavor is not quite right, when ingredients are inevitably lost in transit. But we always make do, somehow, and we keep stirring the pot.

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(This isn't a restaurant review, obviously -- I leave that to the critics and Yelpers -- but I feel obligated to add some notes about Palencia:

1. There was a banana heart in the kare-kare. Not chunks from a can -- an actual banana heart. And the kare-kare was quite good, but maybe the peanut sauce (clearly made from scratch and not from a jar!) could have been thicker.

2. I do love the fact that knives were pointedly (no pun intended) missing from the table, because Filipinos eat with a fork and spoon, dammit. You ever seen a big wooden knife on a Filipino's wall? Of course not.

3. The ukoy was nice and crunchy and didn't require any oil to be soaked up with a napkin. If I weren't allergic to shrimp I might have fought with the Llawyer for the third piece.

4. White tablecloth? Check. White capiz chandelier? Check. Unfailingly polite white waitstaff? Check. I think they do need more Filipino-looking fixtures, but the blown-up sepia photograph by the bathroom and the giant haunted-house mirror were nice touches. (No, really: remember the scene in Nick Joaquin's short story "May Day Eve"? It was that kind of mirror, a ghostly-woman-in-white-holding-a-candle-materializing-behind-you mirror.)

5. Okay, that was a somewhat unfair dig at the waitstaff, who was very generous with their time (we lingered over our jasmine tea until almost closing time last Sunday night). Thanks.

6. The traditional Filipino music playing in the background was nice, but be a little braver, people: there is a lot of contemporary loungey / folkish stuff coming from the Philippines that would make diners ask, "Who is this? Where can I buy this?" in a way that you won't get with banduria renditions of "Bahay Kubo".

7. The sans rival was off too, alas. Slightly toasted / burnt, which was a nice twist, but the butter... Remember Oprah's horror at discovering the amount of butter that went into French cuisine? That's why sans rival has a French name; don't be afraid to use it! There should be at least a slab of butter cream between each layer. Sans rival = death by butter, and this just didn't have the requisite amount of culinary sin involved.

8. The nilaga was excellent, actually: just the perfect amount of saltiness and delicacy and cloudiness that hinted at a stock pot simmering for hours in the back. Which is the way it should be.

9. I'm returning, anyhow, to sample their upcoming brunch menu. Should be good.

10. The portions are huge, by the way -- not "huge for a nice restaurant in the Castro", but "huge for a Filipino restaurant in the Bay Area". It's the semantic difference between "big" and "big-ass", folks.

11. One rather funny grace note of sorts: towards closing time, we could hear someone, in an American accent, practicing something in Tagalog he had just learned: "Sino ang tatay mo? Sino ang tatay mo?" (This means "Who's your daddy?", a translation of a rhetorical question that could probably be useful in certain contexts.)

Oh, I'm descending into Yelpish snark here, but that Filipino restaurant in Berkeley that opened a few months ago? Terrible. Sorry.

Posted by the wily filipino at December 9, 2007 11:41 PM