A MOTHER’S LIE, beautifully done: lapu lapu in zucchini and pistachio crust
Good food makes me rush into the meal. You’ve been there, spooning hurriedly into a stew, drizzling a bit of sauce everywhere, drenching the meat in that house dip, slurping happily.
But a meal that comes with a good story, that one makes you pause. Does the meal go down better? The jury is still out on that one, but there is a definite: A side of anecdote makes good meals, memorable.
“This, this is a pasta that my grandmother used to prepare for me,” says Chef Andrea Burzio, Shangri-La Mactan’s Italian chef, of a beautiful lamb ragu on a mound of thin ribbon-like handmade pasta called the taglierini or tagliolini, but fondly as tajarin in Piedmont, Chef Andrea’s hometown, and its true origin.
The ragu itself was as heady as I expected it to be, the lamb’s full flavor appealing to my tastebuds, punctuated by a perky Pecorino cheese.
His main dish was a tale of a mother’s deception, a common story that cuts across many a great restaurant’s history
(Here, a sidestory I cannot resist sharing. Rica’s Café’s famous version of calamari came to be in the same way. Rica King-Deen refused to eat her veggies as a kid so they were fried and served with the squid to disguise them. They are now, in my book, the most delicious interpretation of this Spanish classic).
“I didn’t like to eat my fish when I was a young boy, so my mother dressed it in zucchini and pistachios,” he shares.
“When I finished my meal without me finding out what was in it, she would say “See, you ate your fish!” His interpretation of this lie made from a place of love?
A delicate lapu-lapu fillet with grilled winter crops, garlic, and dots of paprika mayonnaise.
“That was an opulent serving,” declares Carlo Zoccolari, whose wines we paired with dinner tonight.
His Palladium K. Martini and Sohne Gewurztraminer 2015 was my personal favorite, its intense floral aroma a perfect foil for the subtletly of the fish.
A close second, however, would be the dessert wine that came right after, the Muscato D’Asti Tenimenti 2015, also favored by my seatmate, Shangri-La Mactan’s Director of Communications Cassandra Cuevas.
We’ve both made a mental note to bear children with Italian men because they do not deprive their women of wine even when pregnant after seeing Mercia Melgar Caamiño raise a glass of limoncello with us at the end of dinner.
Fourteen weeks into her pregnancy with Carlo’s future sommelier.
“In Chapter 3, I’ll introduce my heirloom dishes because this part is called La Mia Famiglia (My Family),” promises Chef Andrea.
Tonight’s La Mia Infanza (My Childhood), was the perfect time to drop in on this five-chapter saga of his many lives.
After all, the narrative of this culinary storytelling is hinged on Chef Andrea’s favorite childhood read, Uno Nessuno e Centomila: a novel by the Nobel prize-winning playwright Luigi Pirandello about a man who comes to the realization that as he lives his life, he becomes uno (one), nessuno (no one), and through the eyes of those he meets, centomila, a hundred thousand people.
Tonight, and for the rest of December at Acqua, meet the bambino. One that ends the meal with a shot of grappa, of course.