Ronald Villavelez
WHEN an English chef and restaurateur—who had worked with Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay, and whose restaurant, Pollen Street Social, in Mayfair, has maintained a Michelin star since 2011—opened a restaurant in Cebu, middle of last year, I was goofy with happiness, with renewed enthusiasm in the local dining scene.
Chef Jason Atherton’s The Pig and Palm, tucked in Cebu Business Park’s less busy Pescadores Road, a few blocks away from the bustling Ayala Center Mall, offers a new perspective, as far as flavors and dining experience is concerned. When fine-dining restaurants abroad have veered away from the very formal and stiff-necked dining room setting and ambiance, Pig and Palm does just that with its predominantly brick-and-wood interiors that lend a cozy, rustic, casual atmosphere. It almost has a gastropub vibe to it that makes this dining place less intimidating.
Well, until you open the menu, because some items can be too pricey. By Cebu standards, I mean. But I often remind myself, you always pay for top quality ingredients and the punctilious way your food must be prepared, especially when restaurants, like this, aim to uphold principles and standards behind techniques and methods. (I have a pet peeve for restaurants that cheat with their methods and ingredients.)
A few months after it opened, I was able to book a table for three so easily, surprisingly (perhaps, local diners are not wont to call for reservations); our lunch reservation was booked two hours prior. My friends and I ordered several dishes that we decided to share (I just wished restaurants in these parts offered lunch and dinner tasting menus), and most of these dishes are no longer on the current menu: English peas, broad beans and smoked curd; tuna tataki, pickled muli and cucumber (one of my favorites from the early menu); roasted suckling pig with onion soya gravy, apple and mustard leaf (whitepart only, but I would have wanted the green part).
I wonder why the tuna tataki was taken out of the new menu, when I thought it was a refreshing dish for a starter
because of its lightness, the perfect balance of the tuna’s fresh-sweetness with the crunch and piquancy of the pickled muli and cucumber. For me it was a clever way to prepare the palate for the well-loved sweet (how Cebuanos love them sweet!), tender and succulent suckling pig dish (and the confit pork belly on the new menu), perhaps the very reason why there’s pig in Pig and Palm.
After we had the suckling pig—which, too, is no longer on the menu—we still couldn’t have our fill. My friend, Myles, ordered a round of mini burgers, while I had the local red mullet and clams in beer and bacon broth, which, to me, was a more sophisticated version of my mother’s inun-unan dish.
It took us more than a year to come back to Pig and Palm, one for a Sunday brunch with the same group of high school friends, and a dinner date, a few weeks ago, with my partner, Enrico. For dinner, the restaurant, which is now my most favorite dining place in the city, offers a wider selection on the menu, where the dishes get to be more interesting, and playful.
Because I am more of a “starter-and-appetizer” kind of person (I’d rather have more starter courses than mains), we ordered two: salt-baked beetroot, goat’s cheese and walnut, and cauliflower salad with parsley, parmesan and walnut. The former was a perfect marriage of flavors with the walnut as the element of surprise. On the latter, parsley (which most restos in the city only use for garnish) was the headliner of the dish and I never thought it could work that perfectly with the cauliflower, the parsley’s aroma, and piquant flavor coming through. I have tried roasting cauliflower with lemon-parsley dressing or pan-roasting cauliflower with rosemary, parsley and garlic, but this dish with the parmesan was, altogether, a taste sensation, it was as though parsley had taken on a new flavor.
For our main, Enrico had his roasted parrot fish, clams, bacon leeks and parsley. After a few bites, I could see him beaming with delight. He volunteered to compare this with the parrot dish he had at lunch at Kayu that same day. While the latter had a “homey” feel to it, this one at Pig and Palm had more flair and finesse. How can you eat two different parrot dishes on the same day?
My confit pork belly glazed with apple caramel, and came with an unbelievably smooth mashed potato and grated broccoli on the side, was pleasantly unctuous and indulgent. It was an obscenely pleasurable treat of tenderness, textures and flavors. And every bite would just melt in your mouth, while teasing your taste buds, it made me wonder how did they do that? The thing, though, because I already consumed a lot of starters, I could not finish my pork belly. If it was on a tasting menu, I would have been served a smaller portion of it, just enough to enjoy the dish and relish the flavor experience.
After our main courses, we weren’t sure if we had enough room for our desserts. I had to take a break, went outside and puffed a few ciggies. When we were ready, we signaled to have our desserts served. For Enrico, I chose the baked 60% chocolate moelleux and salted caramel ice cream. I thought he had to try it. I had coffee parfait, mascarpone and amaretto, and chocolate. They were both well-executed dishes, but they were too cloyingly sweet that I was looking for some burst of fresh, citrus-sy, tangy flavors, like some compressed or pickled cut fruits, perhaps to assuage the guilt of a sweet tooth’s inordinate
craving.
Pig and Palm, after more than a year in the business, has seen itself evolve with a dynamic and vibrant menu, as it strives to live up to its promise. With their resources, and talents abounding in their kitchen, I see them as the perfect organization that can explore and bring to the forefront of fine-dining experience unique Filipino flavors and ingredients—those that are representative of our terroir and diversity of our natural resources. And perhaps, reimagine a Filipino cuisine we can bring to the future.