The best restaurants are the ones you have yet to try.
I have yet to decide whether this optimism is a result of, or the reason behind, the way reviews of restaurants in Manila are conducted and written (not excluding myself): the urgent quest for the new, the hotly anticipated, and scooping one’s colleagues.
When the Michelin Guide reigned supreme, it was not only getting the third star that turned a restaurant into a legend; it was also keeping the three stars year after year.
Bernard Loiseau, the French chef of his own eponymous three-star restaurant in Saulieu, blew his brains out with a shotgun after rumors circulated that the inspectors would take one star away from his resto. (The rumor turned out to be false, and Loiseau’s wife continues to operate the three-star restaurant.)
But the dining places that make the news, and which have the longest queues and wait lists for reservations, are those that have just opened, leaving the old guard abandoned.
It’s unabashedly first-past-the-post journalism, and although it makes for more exciting headlines or more clickable links, it also means that my colleagues and I have to try restaurants when they are just in their infancy and are still ironing out the kinks.
Or we have to rely on quicker judgments than we would have liked to come to.
Franchises
I try my best to correct over-hasty impressions and errors, but the reality is that the ideal redress for this problem is that it is a wide field, with many with a plurality of views, both in print and online. No one will have the power of the Michelin Guide, or even of Ruth Reichl or Craig Claiborne in the States.
Now that food has not just entered, but occupies a disproportionate amount of mainstream discourse, there are national food critics, regional food critics, and, very importantly in the case of the Philippines, online food critics.
What were the 10 most exciting restaurants of 2014?
I have my list, but I’m sure there are countless variations being prepared. So are the 15 most anticipated restaurants of 2015, and something oddball, like the most important restaurant of 2014. (It’s not what you think!)
But I do think that this is a good time to ruminate on what kind of year it has been, and where the industry is headed.
This is the year the franchises came to be a player in the mid- and high-end restaurant leagues.
It used to be that foreign franchises were for fast food, or for niche markets (Wee Nam Kee chicken rice), or a more youthful crowd (California Pizza Kitchen, which has outlived its neighbor, Tower Records).
But now it seems that everyone is “bringing in” something, like an importer unloading a cargo of PX goods to sell.
It began with the ramen wars, followed by the tonkatsu wars, then restaurants with name recall, thanks to Filipinos’ travels to Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
We’re only human, and it’s hard not to be excited about the lure of luminous name brands, whether it’s retail goods such as Leica and Louis Vuitton, or Tim Ho Wan steamed buns, or Ladurée macaroons long rumored to be made available here.
But it has also set up a dichotomy between chefs and businessmen.
It may be a worldwide trend that the age of the auteur is over; it ended the day Alain Ducasse became the first chef to hold six Michelin stars simultaneously—one in his Monte Carlo location and the other for his Paris restaurant. I’m not sure how cooking, the most sensual of crafts, can be managed by remote control and CCTV; not only Ducasse but Joël Robuchon and many others do it, operating vast restaurant empires with branches in the US, France, Japan, Dubai, Singapore, and now, it seems, the Philippines.
The idea of one chef, with one restaurant, serving a limited clientele who has waited patiently for reservation, is patently antiquated. And as soon as even homegrown restaurants become successful, the next question is: Where are you opening next?
Ideal partnership
The ideal partnership is between a chef and a sympathetic partner who allows the former his creativity while still managing to keep the business lucrative.
Even if the chef has a business-minded orientation, there’s still only one of him, and he has to have his nose either in the ledgers or in the sauces.
What we are seeing more of are businessmen who aren’t chefs or aren’t sympathetic toward chefs; they could be selling toilet brushes.
It’s not about talent, it’s about the concept. It’s not about a vision, it’s about positioning, location, marketing, and keeping costs down and the glamour factor high, and riding the trends while they’re still hot and getting out before they get stale, and then reconceptualizing.
Most food writers have a natural inclination toward homegrown talent, and despite the influx of chain restaurants or luxury foreign franchises into our ramshackle little town, many of the yearend roundup lists I’ve seen still champion those chefs who continue to push the envelope for Filipino food: Romy Dorotan, Robby Goco, Jordy Navarra, Rob Pengson, Bruce Ricketts (these are just the newcomers).
But it’s hard not to get excited about, say, Nobu opening, or Noma’s lieutenants doing a pop-up, or SoHo’s Dean & DeLuca setting up shop in the heart of Makati.
A neo-liberal argument can be made that if our restaurants are truly world-class, their owners shouldn’t be afraid of the entry of international brands. The latter will bring up the level of competition.
But our psyche is wired to love whatever’s imported, and to address our insecurities about being a cultural backwater, we consume global names. The lone chef without a business ally or patron who just likes to cook doesn’t stand a chance.
In 2015 the war between local and foreign, between chef-auteurs and business conglomerates, between the dictates of conscience to eat local and support what’s homegrown and the dazzle of designer food, will play out in earnest.
The only thing that’s certain is that there will be no shortage of restaurants to try in the coming year. And for many, novelty itself is worth a detour.
There’s nothing that tastes quite as good as anticipation.