What’s cooking with Maritess Gutierrez?

See those huge steel beams that rise to form gigantic billboards along EDSA in Guadalupe? Underneath those beams – lo and behold! – is Café Lupe, the Metro’s newest Mexican dining haunt. Take a peek past the breezy interiors and you’ll find Maritess Gutierrez (who alternates with chef Tony Castro) busy as a bee in the kitchen, supervising the cooking and whipping up treats of her own.

The hectic pace of her work, ironically, is precisely what Maritess enjoys. "What I like about cooking," she shares, "is that there’s a rush all the time; your adrenaline keeps on going and going."

One who abhors having to stay put in one spot, Maritess reveals she is glad she finally found her true calling in cooking. Though born to showbiz royalty – mom is movie queen Gloria Romero and dad, matinee idol Juancho Gutierrez – Maritess never really considered showbiz as a life-time career.

"I was not at all pushed into showbiz," Maritess shares. "In fact, though my mom found it cute to see me on TV once in a while, she didn’t want me to make it my bread and butter because she knows nga my character – that I cannot stay put. My mom was born to be an artista. If you’re in the industry for 50 years, you must really love it, di ba?"

Actually, it wasn’t just showbiz Maritess didn’t warm up to. As she recalls with a laugh, "I didn’t know what I wanted to be for the longest time!"

After finishing Advertising in Maryknoll, Maritess tried assorted jobs – working behind and also in front of the cameras, appearing in two movies and the comedy UFO on Channel 7.

She also got married and gave birth in the US where she stayed for four years after her brief showbiz stint. While there, Maritess recalls, "I had all kinds of odd jobs – I arranged flowers in a flower shop then worked in a pizza parlor as a waitress, then in a doctor’s office (as the one) in charge of insurance and later in a podiatrist’s office."

While shifting from one job to another, though, there was a constant in Maritess’ life – she kept on cooking; she never lost her love for cooking.

Even as a child, Maritess recalls, "I’d cook with a palayok and use cotton balls with alcohol or dried santol leaves for my fire because mom wouldn’t allow me to play with real fire in the kitchen. I used to fry or boil quail eggs that way."

Her love for cooking finally sprung to the fore when Maritess returned to the Philippines. In l999 she saw an ad for a two-year cooking course at the Center for Culinary Arts (CCA) on the TV show, Oh No It’s Johnny. Maritess then plunged headlong into the course.

"It was a general cooking course," Maritess relates, "and we had to learn everything from the conversion of grams to kilos, to how to prep our knives, to how to debone chicken and clean fish. If we studied Asian cuisine in the classroom, we’d apply what we learned in the kitchen. (At the end) I got an award as one of the Most Promising. Not bad, ha? I excelled – at last!"

With some friends, Maritess opened Plaza de Toros in Antipolo which became primarily a learning experience for them. Then Maritess worked for Aresi near ABS-CBN for three years. Maritess says the timing was perfect when a common friend of Café Lupe owner Al Carranza approached her to work there. "After three years in Aresi, I was ready for a new opportunity," she says.

"Cooking is not about (strictly following directions from) a cookbook," explains Maritess about whipping up Mexican dishes in Café Lupe, "it’s about the country – Mexico – you’re dealing with. You just read and play around with the ingredients, know what’s indigenous to Mexico – beans, rice, corn flour, then you play around. Or cumin, chili, spices. I have to give credit to the first chef who was here. When I got here the menu was already made; I just added my own like pizza that’s not made of regular dough – we use the flour for tortilla.

"Mexican food is easy to appreciate," she continues, "because the taste is not very foreign; it’s basically maanghang with cumin and chilis. They also have ceviche (kinilaw) . Mexican food has a lot of rice like ours – they have soup with noodles like our batchoy here. They also have a lot of salsas. I like using pineapple salsa because it’s refreshing and corn salsa which can be used with anything. Ripe mango salsa is also good."

Maritess points out that though Café Lupe basically serves Mexican food, it also offers Filipino dishes like kare-kare, sisig and sinigang , among others.

Obviously happy with her career now, Maritess only laments she cannot spend as much time as she’d like to on weekends with her 10-year-old son Chris, a La Salle student. "He’s free on week-ends while that’s the time we have the most diners!" she says. Still, she feels thoroughly fulfilled as a mom, taking the time to play badminton, basketball, billiards and even playstation with Chris.

"He’s a very smart boy," Maritess says with visible pride. "He also likes to cook and dance."

Maritess and Chris live with Lola Gloria and Lolo Juancho in New Manila now, so the Gutierrezes are again one big happy family.

Because Maritess’ parents separated when she was about seven years old, Gloria, Maritess says, at first "felt bad about the break-up of my marriage. ‘Naku,’ she said, ‘that’s what happened to me!’ She was hoping my marriage would work out. But you know, these things happen; that’s just life. Some people do worse than that. I don’t make things a big deal; I don’t make mukmok. "

Maritess appreciates it that her mom is always there for them – for her dad whose right side has been paralyzed by a stroke, her son and herself. Maritess affirms her mom is as sweet as her image is as a star, although she says in jest, "She has topak like any normal human – like when she’s tired. But she’s a major cool mom and lola. She gets nervous when I go home alone or if I have to be out late at night.

"I look like my dad, even my mannerisms are like my dad. My dad is more of a cool dad, not like a (regular) dad – he’s more of barkada. My outlook is more like my mom’s because she’s been there all the time to guide me. Her decisions in life that I saw, I absorbed them all. I seek her advice and most of the time, we jibe.

"After doing a movie or a TV show with her, people say being with my mom is like having a mom because she gives them advice. The best thing about being Gloria Romero’s daughter is that she is my live-in mom. She’s always there for me. For some moms I’ve seen, there’s a time out; for my mom, there’s none, even with my son."

With her home life and career in place, it looks like Maritess Gutierrez has finally gotten her ingredients for living right in place. She’s not through with her recipe, though, saying that "being in the industry for less than four years, I still have more to learn."

In the meantime, Maritess just hopes – and works hard to ensure – that Café Lupe diners will leave with the feeling, she says, "That Mexican food tasted so much better!"