A taste of Sandy’s kitchen wizardry in Lutong Daza
Something’s cooking on NET25, and the cook is my cousin, andy! Known to many as a restaurateur, columnist and TV host of long-running and award-winning shows like Food Prints and Casa Daza, Sandy Daza also happens to be my first cousin because his dad and my dad, both deceased, were brothers.
Sandy is the second child of my Tito Boy and Tita Nora Daza. Their eldest, Bong, passed away six years ago. Sandy was followed by siblings Mariles, Stella and Nina.
When I was growing up, I only saw Sandy during our Daza Christmas reunions, or when Nina (who is my age) would invite my cousins and I to sleep over at their place. A true cosmopolitan, he lived in Paris from 1973 to 1975, attended Cornell University in New York from 1975 to 1977, then moved back to Paris in 1977 to 1978. He also resided in San Francisco from 1988 to 1989. In 2001, he emigrated with his family to Vancouver, Canada until he decided to return in 2010 to make Manila his homebase again.
For as long as I can remember, Sandy has always loved to cook. I remember when he baked a French apple pie for my mom when she was pregnant with my sister Penny almost 50 years ago; to this day, my mom swears that it’s the best French apple pie she’s ever had. I can only guess that it was Sandy’s early exposure to good food, thanks to his mom and also to our paternal grandmother, Angeles Daza, who loved to cook and feed all 40 of her grandchildren! But it was when Sandy was a waiter in his mom’s restaurant in Paris, Aux Iles Philippines, that he realized that he was learning by watching the chefs at work. One day, one of the cooks just left, forcing Sandy to step in to cook appetizers. The customers didn’t notice the diff erence and that’s when he got excited and started to take cooking lessons.
As a food patriot, who is on a constant lookout for new Filipino dishes, Sandy believes that Philippine cuisine can be as popular as Chinese, Japanese or Thai cuisine. All we have to do to carve out this niche, he suggests, is to focus on those tasty dishes that are truly unique to us, like sisig, crispy buntot ng tuna, Bicol express, inasal, sinampalukan and bibingka malagkit.
He recalls that when he was in Paris, the French would go wild when they were served prawns with taba ng talangka since they had never tasted the latter before. He also remembers how numerous French customers would devour every Philippine mango they got their hands on until only the white seed was left because they scraped all the mango meat away.
Sandy gets very excited and animated when he talks about the endless possibilities of promoting culinary tourism in the country. It would, of course, be ideal to have foodies travel all over the Philippines and try the specialties of each region, but that would be too costly and time consuming. His dream is to bring the best dishes from all over the country to one restaurant, making it cost eff ective, convenient, and profi table for whoever dares take on this challenge.
For now, though, while this one-stop Pinoy resto remains a pipe dream, he’ll continue to visit his favorite restaurants to get his regular fi x of Filipino dishes: Barrio Fiesta for crispy pata, Joseph and Jaymarks’ for crispy buntot ng tuna, and Aling Mila’s all the way in Angeles, Pampanga for sisig.
To get a taste of Sandy’s culinary expertise and kitchen wizardry, allow me to invite you to watch our new TV show, Lutong Daza, which airs every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. on NET 25. It’s a show that I co-host with him that makes learning how to cook easy, using kitchen-tested recipes that are sure to build your cooking confi dence and deliciously tantalize your loved ones’ taste buds.
And to spice things up even more, we have a new celebrity guest every week to add even more fl avor and fun to the show! Do join us in Lutong Daza. Who knows? Maybe the next dish Sandy, our guest, and I whip up in the kitchen could be what you’ll be cooking for you and your loved ones next.
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