A constant challenge for writers is to go beyond their comfort zone into uncharted territory. It was thus with great fear that I made reservations in a new restaurant, The Wholesome Table, a name that would have had me running fast in the opposite direction just a few years ago.

It was not just the search for novelty that led me to this establishment, I must admit. There has been some pressure, ranging from a subtle sentence left dangling, to fire-and-brimstone exhortations, from my tailor, my doctor, my wife, etc., to curb my expanding girth. I must go from sucking the marrow out of life to gnawing at the pan-grilled breast meat of it.

It seems that the days of eating a Peking duck on my own have drawn to a close, and those of boiled fish and oatmeal loom on the horizon. At a certain age, which apparently I have reached, our inside bits start to glitch, hiccup, and make odd squeaky sounds, and we begin to become more mindful of what we put in our mouth.

I went to The Wholesome Table for lunch, having had nothing but coffee for breakfast, the better to give it a head start, since the restaurant’s reputation as a health-food place was also its handicap.

A steady flow of well-dressed women in aviator sunglasses was making a determined beeline toward it, so that when we arrived at the receptionist’s lectern there were only outside tables left. (The place doesn’t take reservations, as I had discovered the night before.)

Surprised, disappointed

Upon opening the menu I was both surprised and disappointed to see it wasn’t all flax seeds, quinoa, nuts, kale, hemp and lentils. The dishes, with a few exceptions, looked like ordinary food, not too far off from the choices on the menu of an upscale restaurant in Manila.

And, as in most restaurants in Manila, one page of the menu was devoted to a philosophy—in this case, natural, fresh, farm-to-table, local, antibiotic-free, organic and the rest of it.

But the menu items are not health food. With great relief, we ordered a salad, burrata cheese, salmon cream pasta, baked bacalao, butter chicken, and smoothies all around.

The staff was friendly, its members better coiffed and trained than in other restaurants. There was a cool breeze from the oscillating fan, and the only distraction was being surrounded by women eating with their aviator glasses on, like being in the center of a great swarm of snacking bees.

The food ranged from above average to excellent; the only dud was the bacalao, which had the muted taste of something that had been cooked three days ago and reheated in a microwave.

Feminine vibe

But the pasta was full-flavored and generous; the burrata cheese on sourdough (in this case a very light, barely fermented bread) creamy and well-paired; and my daughter enjoyed the butter chicken, although I enjoyed it as well, to make up for the disappointing main dish.

The smoothies were particularly good: The weird stuff like hemp and lucuma is here, but it’s all blended into innocuous and oddly refreshing drinks.

There is steak (grass-fed) on the menu, so large eaters are welcome. But despite the effort to cover all bases, the vibe is distinctly feminine, which is not a bad thing at all, just as one doesn’t fault Robby Goco’s Green Pastures for his take on the organic free-range movement for being unabashedly masculine.

The comparison is not incidental; both tap into the growing new niche of restaurants that have consciousness about ingredients, provenance, and freshness as basic guiding principle, as well as a way of positioning themselves on the market.

Both are unexpectedly generous, and don’t try to gag you on chia seeds. And the food tastes good.

But whether this is a result of the carefully sourced ingredients or the chef’s skill is not clear. To be fair, I’ll stick my neck out and say that it’s probably both.

In a perfect world, though, taking care to select natural, additive-free ingredients shouldn’t be a unique selling point, but something that all restaurants that aren’t fast-food chains aspire to.

But with (to give an example) the price of an organic egg still three times higher than that of the ordinary battery hen variety, most restaurants don’t bother, not if they want to stay alive. It’ll be a while before our food industry evolves to the point when that’s possible.

What would The Wholesome Table do in a perfect world, if all the restaurants followed its lead?

It would still be above-average in terms of food and service, but it would be forced to move further upstream into the more vertiginous territory of food scrutiny and restrictions: designer lentils and heirloom tomatoes with complex pedigrees. Just in time then for when my digestive tract finally shuts down from years of abuse.

Then it’ll really be time for health food.

The Wholesome Table is at 2/F, Bonifacio High Street, 30th St. cor. 7th Ave., Bonifacio Global City; tel. 8670000