Ping Pong Diplomacy is the name of a stylized little restaurant in SM Aura, tucked away on the third floor apart from the cluster of restaurants on the roof-deck floor vying for the same customers.
The name is both a stylistic cue (one wall is dominated by table tennis rackets) and a not-so-subtle statement about what the restaurant offers: unabashedly inauthentic Chinese food, loosely inspired by American Chinese food as it has evolved in the decades since a fateful intersection between sport and diplomacy that went by the same name.
The term “ping pong diplomacy” refers to a watershed thaw in diplomatic relations between the United States and China in the early 1970s, when the exchange of table-tennis athletes between the two countries did what veteran statesmen couldn’t. The establishment of what would become one of most important relationships between two countries traced its origins to these players batting a ball across a net almost 50 years ago.
Cheap, fast, takeaway food
Chinese food in the United States still had a long way to go, but its marginal nature was part of how it gained popularity in a conservative foodscape that continued to believe that real food was a plate of meat with potatoes and vegetables.
It never competed with “real” American food. It was cheap, fast, takeaway, localized ethnic food. Despite the grassroots nature of Chinese chefs cooking for Americans, the homogeneity of American-Chinese food, from coast to coast, was striking. Cooks from across the continent (including those in the flyover states) seemed to be cooking out of the same recipe book of sweet, greasy, oddly compelling recipes that were unknown in China but were definitely Chinese.
The chefs behind Ping Pong Diplomacy have made their names as iconoclasts who deliberately reject the idea of “authenticity.” This is not a problem for me. I go in search of authentic food even while I recognize that the whole idea of “authenticity” is problematic and tied to an idea of food as essentially static—a world which I know doesn’t exist.
But, more often than not, I champion the dynamic nature of food and how it spreads and is assimilated and creolized and reworked and repackaged.
Fusion
My family has complained that whatever food I cook—be it ostensibly a South African bobotie or a Brazilian moqueca—they end up tasting like a French stew, which is the only stew I really know how to make. I am incapable of following directions, and have come up with some hair-raising franken-creations—some stews I’ve had to serve as a soup, with a new name. I’m convinced this is how fusion cuisine started.
I bring this up to emphasize that I have no intrinsic dislike of fusion cuisine (whatever it means these days) or deliberately inauthentic cuisine. And I have enjoyed American stripmall Chinese food in all its gleaming, deep-fried, MSG-laden glory.
Ping Pong Diplomacy is supposed to be a celebration of that kind of food. To an extent, it succeeds.
The wonton cheeseburger, which could have been either a burger made of wonton filling or a wonton made of burger filling (it was the latter), was a step in the right direction. It had strong flavors, a mix of meaty and crisp and fried, licked with onion confit and sriracha sauce.
Repetitive
A few dishes later, I soon realized that the meal was as repetitive as a Philip Glass opera—it was the same combination of sweet, crunchy, fried going into all the dishes. I felt there was a missed opportunity with the dan dan fried rice. It could have been glorious, with the high-intensity goodness of wok hay, that unmistakable taste of heat and iron, paired with starch and a bit of Sichuanese ma-là.
But it was all insipid gloop, a stodgy gruel slicked with oil and chilies.
The meal was simply too much grease and slapdash flavor without subtlety nor harmony.
The food did not need to be authentic to anything other than itself, but—without being psychic, since I don’t really know what the chefs were trying to do—it really felt like the dishes failed within the scope of what they were trying to do.
This might sound like a damning accusation, but it’s actually meant to be encouraging. The ideas are sound, it’s the execution that falls short.
This is not a restaurant to be written off, but one that has to work harder to pull off the difficult, conjuring trick it set out to do. —CONTRIBUTED
Ping Pong Diplomacy, 3/F SM Aura Premier, C5 Road corner 26th St., Bonifacio Global City, Taguig; call 2469069 ext. 626.