There might be no more damning assessment of a restaurant than that the best dish on the menu was the interiors. But, really, these are amazing interiors. It feels like a cross between a private villa at Boracay Shangri-La and Amanpulo with a lounge area and a bar.

The second floor is genuinely dramatic, with high ceilings, halogen spots, and stylish white deck chairs in the outdoor smoking area.

It also happens to be a restaurant, which is not immediately obvious, because it feels so comfortable as a hang-out place. This is, in fact, Fernando Aracama’s long-awaited return to the restaurant scene, and it doesn’t get much splashier than the middle of The Fort with a few million pesos’ worth of architecture and decoration over two floors.

Clearly, the investors expect a lot from Aracama. Just as we—who have loyally followed this chef’s trajectory from the days when it was not yet trendy to serve Filipino food in upscale surroundings, bucked the trend with Uva in Greenbelt 2—expect nothing less than a plenitude of wonders from his latest incarnation.

Something inventive

The food at Aracama Filipino Cuisine isn’t bad; it’s patchy. It ranges from excellent to mediocre to I-could-have-done-this-at-home to underwhelming. At the get-go, the menu fails to draw the diner in at a cerebral level because when one eats Filipino food outside of the house, there’s an expectation of something inventive and exciting and new.

Only a handful of the dishes on the menu at Aracama leaped off the page; the rest of it sounded rather ordinary. I don’t know whether it was or not; it could have been transcendental, but like a book with a depressing title and a dull cover, these offerings never got the chance.

But of the dishes that did make it to our table, some of them were very good indeed. The sous-vide salpicao is the kind of thing we would have wanted to see more of: a traditional flavor that overcomes one of the main problems of salpicao, which is that the beef in the marinade tends to stew rather than sear and ends up as tough, chewy little bullets.

This was magically tender while being garlicky and robust; truly excellent. Fishballs, which came recommended by the waitstaff, were fun and as good as fishballs can be.

Good, not great

It’s with the mains that Aracama tends to descend to the pedestrian. The lamb shank (which is to be found under the ‘Beef’ section in the menu) was not very big and not very exciting.

Pork binagoongan was chunks of lean, rather tough pork, whose only contact with bagoong was possibly being in the same room with a bottle of the stuff. Bagoong should be pungent; it should hit you on the nose and slap you around; and pork bagoong should be drenched in it and reek of garlic and glisten with melting, wobbly fat.

Crispy pata, suwam corn soup and humba pork ribs in soy, were all good, but not great.

Aracama redeems himself with dessert. I thoroughly enjoyed the fried suman, with a surprising hint of ginger kicking it up a notch. The cream puff dough balls with dulce de leche were divine, and I could have eaten a dinner’s worth of these.

They might just surpass Aracama’s famous choc-nut ice cream as his best creation yet. Though, of course that, too, was on the menu (alas, not as generous as the servings at Uva, where three luscious scoops were standard).

The drinks list is impressive and the bartender is generous; while I can’t complain, I worry for the food, in that it may become perfunctory in the face of the bar aspect of this establishment.

Teething process

Restaurant-hopping is no longer an option for us with a toddler waiting up at home, but I can see our younger selves eating three-quarters full somewhere else, and winding up at Aracama for dessert, small bites and drinks.

This would be a shame, because Fernando Aracama is one of the most talented chefs of our generation. Is it simply that gourmet Philippine cuisine (not Filipino food, but cuisine, as is stressed by the full name of the restaurant), has moved forward so far and so fast since he pioneered it being taken seriously only a decade ago? Is it a menu diluted by investors playing it safe? Or is it merely the teething process of a new restaurant?

One of the problems of being Fernando Aracama is that we’ve seen what he can do and the bar is set terribly high. The menu at his eponymous restaurant is too safe, the execution too bland. To succeed here he must tread dangerous waters again and take risks: something which, ironically, is harder to do when there is so much invested in infrastructure and interiors.

We can only hope that the beautiful temple to Filipino food he is now working in supports, rather than stifles, his culinary genius.