This is the kind of week people think food writers have, but that actually most food writers wish they had on a more regular basis.
Since my last dispatch I have had a wine tasting dinner, and a promising new discovery. I wish I could devote an entire article to each of them, but time is of the essence, so I will try to be comprehensive despite being brief.
The week opened straight out of the gate with a vertical tasting of Valbuena at Terry’s Selection in Salcedo. A vertical tasting is like a longitudinal study: You taste the same wine over the course of several years, in this case 2006 to 2011. (Its opposite, the horizontal tasting, is like a cross-sectional study, in which you take a particular year and sample different vineyards, or producers, usually maintaining the same grape.)
In both cases, one’s posture is expected to remain vertical, or at most, slightly diagonal by the end of the evening.
Vertical tastings are more difficult to do properly because you need different years of the same wine. On the part of the taster, you’re looking for more subtle differences from the effects of climate and, in some cases, tweaks on the part of the winemaker. For a fabled wine like Chateau d’Yquem, this is also about how the wine continues to change in the bottle over time.
All this is from my hastily scribbled notes and my very helpful seatmates who guided me through my first vertical tasting.
Balance and detail
After hurtling through six years of very fine wine on an empty stomach, we sat down to one of JC de Terry’s fastidiously created dinners—with more wine. Everything on the table that night was from Vega Sicilia, who are best known for the Unico. From foie gras with truffles, we went on to a bacalao stew in puff pastry, braised lamb, and finally a platter of Manchego, Ossau-Irati and Mahón.
Here the Unico made its appearance in 2007 guise. One of the postulates being laid at during the vertical tasting was that Valbuena need not play second fiddle to its more illustrious, or at least more well-known sibling from the same company. Perhaps it was simply its familiarity, or the tricks being played by the Manchego on my taste buds, but I still ceded the evening—by a very thin margin—to Unico.
As someone who has to cover new restaurant openings and young hothead chefs who throw out stuff meant to dazzle, I was reminded by the absolute balance and attention to detail of JC de Terry’s cooking, and his selection of the wines, that talent has to be tempered by experience.
Mid-career chef
Later in the week, I dropped by a new restaurant by a mid-career chef. Francesco Rizzo has been around the block a couple of times—he was formerly the head chef at Papparazzi in Edsa Shangri-La, was assigned to a few kitchens within the chain abroad, and is finally setting up shop in the Philippines, in Addition Hills to be precise.
I’m all for chefs setting up restaurants in less glamorous locations because it keeps the prices of food low while driving property prices in the area up. But Addition Hills has a bad reputation within the industry for being a hostile breeding ground for restaurants, despite it being accessible from Greenhills and Makati, via the Makati-Mandaluyong bridge.
Whatever happened to Italian food in this country? It seems to have fallen out of favor as quickly as the Nokia and the CD—relics of the 1990s, a time when we made plans by texting each other using, imagine that, number pads to type out letters.
L’Opera and Caruso are still in business, though no longer in front of mind for the Instagram crowd. Francesco’s feels like a bit of a dive into the past, but as we have seen in the preceding paragraphs, that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. It’s a converted house with a gas-fired brick oven, just enough parking and plenty of seating, although many of the dining areas have yet to be finished.
Good reboot
I personally like my Italian restaurants small and intimate, but this is a personal preference, whereas Rizzi is clearly making a business decision based on how many covers his kitchen can serve.
The food is considerably better than the location, the vibe and the quality of the tableware suggest; and like a good reboot, it combines good things from the 1990s with a contemporary touch. Among the standouts were excellent scallops, octopus, burrata, beef cheeks on risotto. An affogato made with frozen zabaglione instead of ice cream had a kick to jolt you back awake after a very comprehensive meal.
This is the opposite of a BGC restaurant where the décor is so stylish as to be painful, and the table dressing is all slate and flat-lay friendly, but the food is mush and pap. Here everything bodes poorly, but then the food is a revelation, and reminds us why we fell in love with Italian food in the 1990s.
The prices are very reasonable, too: One eats very well for less than P2,000 a head, and these are not substandard ingredients, either. I don’t know if this will be the restaurant that will break the curse of Addition Hills, but now is a good time to check it out, before the parking becomes a problem. —CONTRIBUTED
Terry’s Selection, Lafayette Tower, Leviste St., Salcedo Village, Makati City
Francesco’s Kitchen, 863 A. Mabini St., Addition Hills, San Juan; tel. 7779777