Congo Grille F&B director Gilbert Gillette Garcia says the restaurant has attracted a wide market of diners because it intentionally avoided the stereotype of what a Filipino restaurant should look like. Instead of native interiors with capiz windows and buntings, the restaurant was given a safari theme that proved to be attractive to children.
"We were just lucky that we were able to find our market," Garcia declares.
While Congo Grille is just a stone’s throw away from other grill restaurants in the Tomas Morato area in Quezon City, it enjoys a loyal clientele that has grown with it in the past three years. The Sct. Albano outlet opened in December 1999, with the El Pueblo branch in Ortigas Center following in December 2001 and the Pasay Road outlet in December 2001. Work is now underway for a fourth branch, this time to open in Alabang, to cater to the demands of its diners from the south.
"We would ask the diners where they were from and we were surprised that we had Makati diners coming to our Quezon City branch," Garcia relates. "When we opened our Makati outlet, we had so many diners coming from as far away as Sucat and Parañaque. That’s why we thought it best to open another branch in that area."
Congo Grille was originally brainstormed by its general manager Kenneth Sy Tin with his cousin and friends to be a bar where the barkada hang out. However, they decided to open instead a full restaurant to be managed with close friends. Garcia was signed in as F&B director, because of his culinary expertise.
Garcia is also proud to declare that Congo Grille is MSG-free. He makes sure that the kitchen does not employ short cuts in preparing the dishes. Guests with special requests, like those on a low-salt diet, can easily make this request from their servers.
"I trained with a European chef and I learned not to use shortcuts in cooking," he says. "That’s why we do not use MSG here, and neither will you find a microwave oven nor a pressure cooker in our kitchens. If something needs to be boiled for four hours, then it will be boiled for four hours."
Fact is, Garcia started cold in the restaurant business. After graduating from college, he found a job as a kitchen helper to learn fully the ins and outs of the business.
"There are no shortcuts in the kitchen," he declares. "You really need to train to learn how to run a restaurant."
He admits that Filipino food is easy to cook. Since it is the food closest to our palates, he says it wasn’t difficult for him to experiment on traditional recipes.
Take, for example, its sizzling sisig. Congo Grille has three varieties on the menu – pork, tuna and chicken – and more are in the works. When we visited, the restaurant was offering shrimp sisig, one of Garcia’s new innovations.
"Our sisig is a refinement over the traditional recipe," he adds. "It has no pork brains and chicken liver. I’ve substituted mayonnaise and liver spread, instead. It still is not healthy, but at least, I think it’s a little better. And we serve it crunchy, not mushy like in other restaurants."
They say the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Garcia says their sisig is quite popular among children.
To address the health needs of the restaurant’s older diners, the restaurant also offers a number of vegetarian dishes in its menu. It has pinakbet (with vegetables only half-cooked to keep them crunchy), a vegetarian kare-kare, ensaladang talong, laing and garlic kangkong.
Those who can’t shy away from crispy pata can instead have the crispy tuna tail, which Garcia says is just as good as the real thing.
"The tuna tail has ligaments that have the same texture as pork tendon," he says. "When served, when you bite on those ligaments, it’s like you’re biting on real pork litid."
In fact, the restaurant’s best-sellers are still sizzling sisig and crispy pata. On a Friday night, they sell as much as 100 orders of crispy pata and 200 orders of sizzling pork sisig.
This grill restaurant boasts a variety of grill items. Take your pick: tuna belly, tuna panga, blue marlin, pork spareribs, pusit, pork bbq, beef ribs, chicken Bacolod, plapla, sugpo and bangus. At Congo Grille, they are all served with a sweetish soy sauce dip to complement all the items.
And then there are the dessert items. Garcia is quite proud of his Congo Mango, a mango sans rival version that is sinful with every bite, and Frozen Maki, a dessert variation of the Japanese sushi that is served with a chocolate dipping sauce.
Unlike other grills, Congo Grille has an air-conditioned dining area. The entire restaurant has been designed so that the cooking in the kitchen does not seep into the dining area. Garcia is quite proud of this.
"We promise all our guests that when they leave the restaurant, they do not end up smelling of the food," he says.