Two Food Assignments: A Difficult One,  An Easy One

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A Media Lunch with the new Executive Chef of Waterfront Cebu City Hotel, Joerg Walter, is classified by your favourite food columnist as a difficult food assignment. There are two reasons: one is that you have to match your “eating experience” with that of the Chef’s culinary expertise and sense of adventurism.

If you have eaten fish for the last fifty years of your life, that is not fifty years experience of eating fish. That is merely one year’s experience of eating fish multiplied fifty times.  Add some of your own culinary skills in the kitchen so that you can better appreciate the tremendous efforts of how a Chef prepares that single dish. Expensive pa gyud going to a culinary school!

The second reason is that your senses should be in top condition at the time food was served. According to Karen Kalumuck, a biologist at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, “most people don’t realize that most of what we call taste — enjoying a meal or a fine wine — is actually smell and 75 percent of what we call taste is due to what we smell”.

Our nose has five million odor receptors that can differentiate 10,000 odors while the tongue has only about a hundred taste receptors that can detect the five different senses of taste. And my beloved readers of this column can easily enumerate, excuse me, all these five senses.

Let us take the first dish served during the lunch, a Cured Marinated Scottish Salmon Flavored with Beetroot and Apple

finished in a blend of 5 Oriental Spices. There are several nuances behind this dish which a good food columnist should know.

First nuance is the fact that almost all salmon sold in the market comes from a farm, that is, artificial reared na! And there will be always a difference in “taste” similar to the taste of a native chicken as compared to those chickens reared in cages. Another nuance is the blend of spices: is it the regular blend of 5 spices (cinnamon cassia bark, Sichuan peppercorn, star anise, cloves and anise seeds) or new mixtures wherein cassia buds are added with ginger root?

So many things to study, this job of a food columnist, and my beloved readers know that too much study can result in a headache which can be cured only by single malt scotch (pwede pud Cognac)!

The dishes prepared by Chef Joerg Walter have been described as “clean, simple and sincere — in visual appeal, in aroma, and in flavour.” And I had six dishes, excuse me, so much work… to dissect, analyze and encode in memory cells to fulfill my role as a food critic. And as a member of the media who were privileged to dine with Chef Joerg‘s creations, I can best describe the taste sensations as very simple….merely pure pleasure!

The second food assignment was an easy one. It was the nth birthday party of Mrs. Elenita de Manuel held at the Casino Español de Cebu last February 20, 2008.

The ambiance was very relaxed; in fact, very warm when you are in the company of friends and not mere, excuse me, acquaintances. And my personal definition of friendship is not measured by the number of years of experiences you have shared together but decades gyud na. There will be very few secrets left between friends except perhaps, the true age of the celebrant!

Dinner began at seven and if food events are held at night, self-imposed restriction of alcohol beverages of your favourite food columnist (none before six o’clock, Philippine time) can be satisfied. You can be a recipient of your host’s generosity, this time a bottle of pure malt Scotch whiskey. 

The food ordered by the de Manuel couple, Abel and Elenita, were really very ordinary dishes: Pescado ala Vizcaina, Roasted chicken with basil cream sauce, Lengua estofada and Paella Valenciana. No new ingredients to analyze, no strange food sensations to dissect, only the very best of what Casino Español can provide.