Truly good food and truly bad food are what shock the palate out of torpor—reminding us of how high and wondrous the peaks can be and how deep the troughs.

We should be grateful that in this country our standards are pretty high, and that cheap, flavorful food is never far away. But at the same time, the high-end restaurants should be continually pushing the envelope and maintaining consistent standards.

This week I had the best meal I’ve had in a long time, including those taken on various trips, but I’m not going to review it because it was an invitation from an already well-known chef, Tonyboy Escalante of Antonio’s. It left me spoiled for the rest of the week—I kept looking for that endorphin high; everything else tasted like cardboard and I would compensate for this by adding lots of chili to kick up some flavor.

That weekend, we were hoping to regain our footing in the real world in our usual family haunt, Seryna, but following a recommendation from a friend, we ended up at Mangetsu, on Jupiter Street, Makati City.

The sign said “Fusion Japanese Food,” which put me off. Since Japanese food is not my native cuisine, I’m generally looking for the authentic one.

But as it turned out, the clientele are mostly Japanese, perhaps because they are looking for a twist to their classics, in the similar way we go to restaurants like Sentro and Pia y Damaso because we want a bit of panache in addition to quality.

We’re still insecure enough about our Japanese food knowledge that we need reassurances of authenticity, like dinginess or crowds of salarymen in a cloud of smoke. Or the word “authentic” rather than “fusion” in the sign.

Well-crafted

So, ironically, even if you don’t try sea urchin pasta and various other innovations, and stay with the classics, you’ll find yourself eating well-crafted, well-thought-out contemporary

Japanese food. It’s definitely a cut above a Little Tokyo tavern but with a price tag comfortably below the increasingly exorbitant Sushi Tsumura.

The sashimi platter of the day was not only bountiful, but also didn’t have too much in the way of the filler to pick through, like prawns or crabsticks. Seared beef sushi melted gracefully in the mouth, with the rice clumped just so; you can pick it up and dip it upside down or dunk it in soy sauce with chopsticks as we were, apparently, not supposed to do.

Either way, the rice remained a coherent whole and didn’t fall to bits. It was probably one of the best sushi I’ve had in town.

The shoyu ramen was quietly competent, nothing too showy. The broth was rich, not gloopy, without being thickened with potato flour, as many of the trendy ramen places do to give it sheen and an artificially heightened feeling of unctuousness. (It’s also what makes one feel uncomfortably full afterwards.)

Soft landing

Mangetsu is a place that should have more people than it does, or at least more of us locals eating, at the very least, the non-adventurous bits of the menu.

I don’t know whether it’s the gimmicky part or not enough of it that’s putting people off, but there are mediocre and run-down Japanese joints with terrible food, at the same price point, that do roaring business.

We promised ourselves we would try the uni omelette or the Japanese pizza at some point, but with plenty of fresh fish and a wizened sushi chef to dish it up, with easy parking, and not having to claw through queue-jumpers for a table, I have a feeling this will become a regular spot for us.

You can’t eat perfectly rare pigeon and seared foie gras every night, unfortunately, and the only real remedy to having a transcendental experience is to have a truly abysmal one to cancel it out.

Failing that, a good meal in an above-average restaurant, as we had at Mangetsu, brings one back to earth with a soft landing rather than a thud.

Mangetsu is at 38 Jupiter Street, Makati City; tel. 4783292