The first time I went to America as a young boy, my family stayed with an aunt and uncle who had a home in the suburbs. After a transpacific flight on a Pan Am DC-10 and then a connecting leg on a Trans-World Airways Boeing 727, we arrived at a house that had carpets from wall to wall and even up the stairs.

Unique and memorable was the smell of America: It’s the same smell that whooshes out when you open a balikbayan box today; it’s the smell of giant packets of cereal and tubs of cheese balls and Goldfish crackers and centralized air-conditioning.

I’ve had some very weird food at dives in New York, as well as sumptuous feasts at places like Lutece and Daniel Boulud when they still mattered. But the memories I took home of American food were the solid middle-class restaurants in the suburbs of upstate New York; Raleigh in North Carolina; and Portland, Oregon.

In the ’80s these weren’t as commercialized and homogenous as they are today, and there were still some good family restaurants (both in the sense of being family-owned, and for families) that were welcoming, casual, and unfailingly generous with their serving portions.

Chains like Fridays or Dennys use the trappings of the family restaurant to sell junk. Even in the Midwest, locally owned restaurants are a dying breed.

No rice, no gravy

One of the few restaurants in Metro Manila that not only gets the vibe, but also the food, of middle America is Kettle, at the Shangri-La Plaza’s new East Wing. It’s as though someone had lived all over the United States and taken home the best of all regions: There’s  clam chowder from the Upper East coast; pastrami sandwich from Manhattan; and fried chicken with cornbread from the Midwest. Or, it could be Southern, but it feels more Midwestern to me, with a bit of time in the oven to harden the crust, and a darker, richer gravy.

Cornbread is also more Midwestern, rather than the biscuits (which are more like a crumbly scone, rather than a cookie, which causes great confusion for Anglophones).

The difference is important because fried chicken is very significant to me. As a struggling student in the United Kingdom, marooned in a university town with very little in the way of good food, I ate at Kentucky Fried Chicken every day for three years. In England KFC serves fried chicken with chips instead of rice, and no gravy, which was a shock to me because in Manila people drink gravy by the glass.

But a decade later I’ve come to the conclusion that no one makes better fried chicken than KFC. You can probably make it healthier, or more authentically Southern, but not better.

I give the folks at Kettle my most sincere compliment by saying that their buttermilk fried chicken is as close as you’ll get to KFC, but with much less grease and chemical enhancers. It might just be one of the best pieces of fried chicken in town.

Comfort food

The Reuben sandwich was great, too. One of the greatest miracles the Jewish migrants pulled off was creating beef that tastes like pork, and the pastrami is faultless. I can imagine that the corned beef, which we didn’t have, would be similarly well-cured.

The pumpkin soup and the clam chowder erred on the side of heaviness, though not stodge, like the cafeteria kind that sets like a blancmange when cool.

The only rather drab dish we had was the lamb adobo, which was brown and coarse and stringy.

This restaurant has the same problem as Green Pastures’ having “al fresco” seating in the mall area rather than in an enclosed space. My wife liked the relaxed atmosphere it gave, but I still feel that it’s rather an odd concept.

The other problem is that Kettle has far too much tableware. We were three adults at a table for four, but the plates, some big, some small, all heavy, were soon stacked up on one another. We asked for some paper napkins, and those arrived on a large rectangular plate as well. The service was struggling to catch up but all the food arrived in due course.

I think that few things make one as angry as leaving a restaurant feeling hungrier or somehow unsatiated. The presentation might be a bit too fussy for a down-home sort of place, and the menu cluttered with a few less-than-stellar dishes; but if one walks out with a stomach full of good food and a sense of having gotten your money’s worth, then minor faults recede in the distance.

This is now what is apparently called “comfort food,” though not long ago it was simply called a good meal out. America these days needs more of these restaurants, and so do we.

Kettle is at 5/F, Shangri-La Plaza East Wing, Mandaluyong City. Call 6547077.