On Father’s Day this year, my family asked  me what kind of dinner we should have to celebrate.

“All I want is to not have to drive and not have to cook,” I said. So we ordered Aristocrat food delivery, and I was the happiest dad in the world.

Cooking itself is great fun, but not so much the early morning trek to the market for fresh ingredients, prepping and washing up, which is what almost all of the world’s cooks, who are homemakers and not chefs with white toques, have to do as well as the actual cooking.

When I started cooking again in a domestic kitchen while living abroad, I discovered that every bowl you use is also a bowl you have to wash later. It also means that you can only use a single oven at a time, that intense grilling will probably set off the smoke alarm, and that you can’t use half the refrigerator for fermentation experiments or to try and dry-age a side of beef.

Perfect solution

Parenthood has put the final lid on my madman-in-the-kitchen days. Some other parents seem to be able to continue to enjoy a thriving social life at home, and balance crystal decanters and toddlers with flawless grace even after their third scotch, but we are not quite so competent.

For us, getting ready for guests means panic mode, stashing crayons in drawers, retrieving Lego pieces from unexpected crevices, and then shoving everything into a spare room where guests inevitably wander by accident.

So when I discovered Prime 101, it seemed to be the perfect solution for entertaining or dining out (yet in) among the space-challenged, condominium-dwelling crowd.

It’s like being able to take over a large living room and dining space for an evening, which you share with a few other diners, the tables generously spaced so that each feels as though it has its own private nook.

The interiors are angular and modern, a little bit over-designed but pretty, like a model unit for a new apartment. The concept behind this restaurant is “freestyle dining,” which sounds like swimming while eating, but it isn’t.

Those who were alive in the  ’90s might remember a dining concept that was trendy then, which involved buying fresh meat and seafood at a display counter, having it weighed and then sending it off to be cooked. This is the updated, upscale version of that, and I mean that in the best way possible. It gives you the freedom of creativity without the bother of having to actually create it yourself.

Tradecraft

Among restaurants, it’s unique in turning the cult of the chef as a creative dictator on its head, and asking him to put his skills at your whims. This is not a place for a chef to flex his ego,

but rather for him to ply his tradecraft well; and there’s nothing wrong with that: Too many chefs are absorbed in creating a cult of personality that they forget about making the customer happy.

Actually, there is a selection of appetizers and mains, non-freestyle, that looks quite promising, so you could, if you want, order off the menu as you would in a normal restaurant. But we, like most diners, were drawn to the long chalkboard full of the good stuff that you would find at a high-end restaurant: prime rib, rib-eye, tomahawk, lamb chops, sea bass, mussels, soft-shell crab, and so on.

If the ingredients are available and the chef knows how to do it, they’ll make it for you. The idea of limitless possibility actually stymied me, and in a moment of panic I finally fell back on what every man, no matter how sophisticated he claims to be, actually wants more than mousseline in aspic or ash-scented seafood foam: a steak with béarnaise sauce and foie gras.

The steaks come in portions of at least 500 grams, which sounds harmless, until you put it in non-metric terms. If you finish your portion you’ll have eaten a pound of flesh, and that’s how much more you’ll weigh in the morning, at the very least.

Unique concept

The cooking is confident and very competent, which is what you want for a unique concept like this. Rare was delivered as properly rare, medium-rare as medium-rare.

There were various flavored salts, mustard and horseradish, and a mysterious but not unpleasant foie gras gravy. I’m sure if we had asked for A1 steak sauce they wouldn’t have blinked; it’s supposed to be freestyle, after all.

There were a few minor niggles: The prime rib was more sinewy than I would have liked; and really, 500 g of meat is a lot, even for me. The mushroom risotto was an unforgiving lump of stodge. And there is something of a long wait between ordering and when the food comes, which I presume is to thaw the meat properly; although this is mitigated by the comfy sofas to sink into.

The food is not better but, more importantly, not less good than you would get at a high-end hotel or club; but the sense of privacy and intimacy is the main draw here. Those with palatial mansions, a freezer of prime cuts, and a trained chef at their disposal in their own homes need not apply, but for the rest of the 99 percent, it’s a rare chance to indulge one’s caprices and then have someone else do the cleaning up: like eating out but staying in.

Prime 101 is at 2226 Chino Roces St., Makati; tel. 7208674