Chef JP Anglo, who has been very much in the limelight this year, has not so much moved into, as arrived at, his new dining place at Joya Towers at Rockwell.

It isn’t another branch of his much-beloved Sarsa, which is now at MOA and Legazpi Village, in addition to the first one in a nook at Bonifacio Global City.

Ever since the first Sarsa opened I’ve been directing people to check it out, and I think some were disappointed that the restaurant was casual and low-key, rather than expensive and pretentious as the others in BGC.

But for people who liked classics and decried the fact that they couldn’t get a decent chicken inasal anywhere in the city, it was great to have a clean, well-lighted place for authentic batchoy without having to fly to Iloilo or Bacolod, as well as reinterpretations of old favorites that tasted familiar but with a novel ingredient or the added flair of a sizzling plate.

Diffident

The cooking at Kafe Batwan is a bit diffident, like an independent filmmaker accustomed to shooting on a single-camera DSLR rig transitioning to Arri Alexa on dolly tracks and being given free rein, with an entire production team to go with it.

I think that its affiliation with the Sarsa brand (which is unavoidable) may hold back rather than help, because those who go to Kafe Batwan looking for Sarsa fare will be disappointed.

Kafe Batwan is another enterprise and aesthetic altogether and should be celebrated for it. The essential qualities of Anglo’s cooking are still there: big, bold flavors, like a soundtrack with an expanded brass section, yet with all the tastes resolutely Filipino.

But I’ve always championed chefs who do new and crazy things with Filipino cooking instead of chasing after some ephemeral idea of absolute authenticity and correctness.

So, if Anglo wants to apply the classic seasoning of inasal to a pork chop and pair that with atchara and a camote mash, I’m all for it, especially if it tastes as good as it did.

The batchoy, which I recommend heartily, is done more like a ramen, with thick, sweetish and very umami broth from long-simmered bones, with molten rather than hard-boiled eggs.

I had an inasal burrito which was, admittedly, a little strange; I preferred it with a trio of dips (one made from smoked mussels, I think) rather than the aïoli sauce it was served with.

Recommended dishes that we didn’t get to try were the pancit palabok cooked with crab fat, and the prawns cooked in something like a Mexican “mole” sauce.

Superstitious

Restaurateurs are a superstitious lot, because it’s very hard to predict what will do well or whether or not some reviewer will come and crap all over their hard work. There are some spaces that simply seem to be hexed, where owner after owner will try his luck—but like salted earth, are unable to sustain life.

Rockwell seems to be strewn with more “unlucky” spaces than most areas, so that one begins to suspect that it might have more to do with finance and real-estate issues rather than necromancy. The three restaurant spaces at Edades, for instance, seem to be, to varying extents, missed opportunities, given their perfect location.

But it might be the attractiveness of the location that leads to inflated rental prices, which, in turn, make unrealistic demands on the financial side.

I am not privy to the numbers involved, but the going rate for places like Kafe Batwan can’t be cheap; and they are doing the right thing in making up for it with volume (there is an upstairs and tables outside which, in the coming months, might be habitable), using premium ingredients so that people will be willing to shoulder higher prices, and by serving breakfast as well as lunch and dinner till 10:30 p.m. This actually works out well because there aren’t many good places open for breakfast in that part of town.

More experimental

While breakfast food should be relatively conservative, because people aren’t really feeling very adventurous at that hour, I am looking forward to seeing Anglo be more experimental rather than less, and to really own the idea of creating his own new brand of Filipino cuisine, rather than falling back on familiar ideas.

In other words, Kafe Batwan shouldn’t just be Sarsa “luxe,” while customers familiar with Anglo’s earlier work shouldn’t walk in looking for the stuff he’s done before. There’s plenty of room here for new Philippine cuisine which, ironically, doesn’t really have to be Filipino at all.

“Creativity” in Filipino food has too long consisted of cooking imported ingredients in a local manner, or cooking local ingredients and flavors in a foreign manner. We’ve gone far beyond that to simply celebrating the creativity of making something that tastes good, from ingredients and techniques local and foreign. And Kafe Batwan seems an ideal laboratory for this brand of alchemy.

Kafe Batwan is at Joya Lofts and Tower, Rockwell Center, Makati City.