Things I miss

I was initially thinking of writing a business column for today since it is already a work day and the business community is mostly back from that long, two-week holiday we just had. However, since it is also a Friday and we are headed for the regular weekend, most may still not really be in the mood to read about business stuff going into the weekend.

Some may still have a holiday hangover and, thus, may appreciate a more “nostalgic” piece about things we miss about the past. Since this will partially be about food, it may prove to be a better read than writing a straight business story, and may spur us to rethink our own values about local production.

I assure you that this column will make sense when I get back to business mode on Monday.

My husband and I were having a roast prime rib dinner in Quezon City, as we could not think of a good steak restaurant in the area that serves a nice and juicy local tenderloin. To be quite honest, or at least in my own opinion, most of the steak restaurants in the city now serve badly cooked tenderloin that are mostly frozen and thawed, resulting in dry steaks. I could be more specific and name restaurants, but taste is subjective and I am not a qualified food critic. I simply express my own preference.

I look for value for my money and am not one to patronize a pricey steak restaurant because they are part of an internationally renowned chain that calls the loin cut a fillet (which of course it is). Calling a loin cut a fillet somehow elevates the meat, but not necessarily its quality.

A good piece of meat may also be totally destroyed by a bad cook, and oftentimes that is more reason why a restaurant ends up serving a bad steak. Unfortunately, the quality of our local line cooks are below par, without the proper education and passion to understand and appreciate the need for good quality ingredients to create really good food.

Even the steak restaurants in some of our five-star hotels do not properly teach or monitor how their line cooks handle what may be good meat, thus serving badly cooked and seasoned steaks.

Additionally, Filipinos in general, as most foreigners have noted, are not keen on demanding a high-level quality of food or service, and are not likely to return the dish if they are not pleased with the quality. Most are too embarrassed to demand for what they are paying for, thus allowing the restaurants to continue serving sub-par quality food.

Of course that is not always the case, one local steak restaurant that I miss to this day that served a reasonably priced and juicy sizzling tenderloin was the five-decades old Alfredo’s Steak House along Tomas Morato that closed its doors on June 30, 2022.

The key to Alfredo’s success was its ability to source local steaks, thus allowing it to serve fresh steaks cooked simply and not masked by a mixture of spices which good meat does not really need.

There were many factors that led to the decision to close the venerable Alfredo’s – topmost of course is that after 54 years, the original owner had aged and his family members were probably not keen on operating the restaurant and wanted to move on to other things.

But another reality was probably the ability to continue sourcing local meat. According to a report from the Philippine Statistics Authority, the volume of cattle production from July to September 2023 was recorded at 51,820 metric tons, live weight, indicating an annual decline of 1.5 percent from the same quarter of the previous year level of 52,610 metric tons, live weight.

The top producer of cattle in the country are Northern Mindanao, Central Visayas, the Ilocos Region, Western Visayas and SOCCSKSARGEN. The PSA reported that in comparison to their levels in the third quarter of 2022, 11 regions posted decreases in production during the third quarter of 2023.

Local producers, of course, also face competition from imported meat that is produced cheaper and in bigger volumes, allowing meat importers to undercut the price of local cattle growers who also have to import their source cattle stock.

Imports have been the bane of the Philippine agriculture sector as clearly felt now by the rice sector. Our own garlic and onion sector has not been able to secure protection from the onslaught of legally imported and smuggled garlic and onions.

So many things I miss have been replaced by imports...our native banigs, which is one of our local cultural treasures, have been replaced by plastic mats as they last much longer and are easier to clean and upkeep. The same goes for our locally woven blankets that are now passed up by Filipinos in favor of foreign imported blankets.

We used to have local production of flavorful patis or fish sauce from Pangasinan. Unfortunately, because of the artisanal method of local production, the industry has virtually disappeared and imports from Vietnam, Thailand and Korea have proven to be more popular to Filipino consumers. The remaining commercial production of patis is mostly an inferior salty sauce without flavor.

Just recently, attention was focused on the importation of salt as local production has nearly disappeared. If you are old enough, you may recall that the area of Sucat and Las Piñas were our salt fields and that going to that area was where one could find local salt producers selling their harvested production along the road. Interestingly, there is still one salt vendor located right at the back of the NAIA airport runway road. Am not really sure though if he is selling locally produced salt as his supply looks quite refined.

I also sorely miss the abundant supply of locally caught fish sold along the Manila Bay seashore as recent as the early construction of the Cavitex. Nowadays, the predominant fish sold in our local wet markets are farm-raised tilapia and bangus, imported sardines, mackerel and galunggong.

The lack of adequate supply of sardines and mackerel has forced local canned fish manufacturers to import their fish for canning. Even our once abundant and good quality tuna are rare, with the best quality catch prioritized and sold to the export market. Thus, we have to settle for lower quality tuna. Local Japanese restaurants now serve a very limited range of sushi with more of farm-grown salmon and manufactured imitation crab kani sticks, and inferior quality and anemic-looking tuna slices.

In the recent past, ihaw-ihaw and ihawans were the rage with the abundance of panga and buntot ng tuna, as well as tanigue and a variety of marine-caught fish, seashells and local seaweeds – both of which have also virtually disappeared and can only be found in seaside provinces. It is likewise sad that most local restaurants now offer imported salmon and pangasius on their menus rather than locally caught fish in an island nation like ours.

And yet we continue to open up our market while neglecting to ensure our own food self-sufficiency and security concerns.