Could 2009 be the year Filipino food breaks through to rest of the world? Two months into it, all signs point to yes. Pinoy cuisine — as stubbornly regional and hard to define as it is — has come into its own with not just one, but two popular food series on Discovery Travel & Living devoting entire episodes to all things Pinoy.
One of them was Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, which was shot in the Philippines last October and aired in the United States Feb. 16 (a local airdate has yet to be set).
Filmed at the same time but airing ahead in March is World Café: Asia, hosted by chef, restaurateur and global nomad Bobby Chinn.
Chinn, a self-described “ethnic mutt,” is half-Chinese and half-Egyptian, born in New Zealand and sent to boarding school in England. He has lived in New York and San Francisco, where he trained under star chefs like Gary Danko, Hubert Keller and Traci des Jardins. He is currently based in Vietnam, where he operated a number of restaurants before opening his own in Hanoi, the eponymous Restaurant Bobby Chinn.
Despite the sore throat, Chinn in high spirits, with good reason. World Café is a primetime hit in the Lion City and so is Chinn, a 45-year-old bachelor who has a reputation as something of a ladies’ man. We flew to Singapore to interview him, watch him cook and taste his food, which is most often described as “fusion,” though Chinn himself pokes fun at the term, instead labeling it “confusion.”
Last October, Chinn toured and shot the Philippines for 10 days, guided by local personalities like Gene Gonzalez, Carlos Celdran, and a college friend he reconnected with on Facebook, politician Hans Palacios. “I used to call them the Filipino Mafia, a family of five that basically controlled the student body and student magazine,” he says. “He took me around, showed me the back streets of Manila because he wanted to show me the state of his country.”
Chinn’s favorite Filipino dish is the one Gonzalez showed him how to cook, our classic adobo. “Gene is a really good gentleman and an artist. His young daughter does the food styling and his son (cooks). It’s nice to see a small family business that has expanded into a cooking school and restaurant and pursuing his art. He’s kind of your ambassador for food.”
Like most foreigners setting foot on Philippine soil for the first time, Chinn knew very little about the country “outside the fact that you played basketball and politically we’re really good friends. You have the largest burial ground outside the US for US soldiers, and you guys speak Spanish. That was about it.”
In the preview we see of World Café: Asia’s Manila episode, Celdran steers Chinn through Intramuros — San Agustin Church, in particular — while food blogger Marketman leads him around Salcedo Market. Chinn samples halal spaghetti and balut at Plaza Miranda, and even spends time at SM Mall of Asia.
It was his global outlook and ease in front of a camera that landed him a job on TV. A Malaysian production crew tapped Chinn for his “hip, happening, cool” connections in Hanoi before realizing that what was hip, happening and cool was Chinn himself. “They said, ‘Let’s interview this guy!’ The director said, ‘I don’t want to interview a chef. They don’t know sh*t, they can’t describe their own food.’” But Chinn ended up doing a test anyway, delivering a spontaneous spiel that sounded professional even when a technical error forced him to repeat the whole thing.
“By the time we did it, the director says, ‘You could do a cooking show.’”
After viewing his test DVD, Discovery Travel & Living liked Chinn so much they gave him his own series after just three pilot episodes and — now that Chinn is represented by Jamie Oliver’s and Gordon Ramsay’s agent — you know he’s joined the big leagues. Comparisons to Bourdain, who wrote the foreword to Chinn’s cookbook Wild, Wild East, have even been cropping up.
“The difference is that No Reservations is Anthony Bourdain’s perspective of being the insightful traveler who has a lot of credibility for his writing skill and being the guy that basically exposed the restaurant industry in a manner that no one else would have dared written,” Chinn says. “So he’s a ballsy kind of guy. I’m really more of a global mutt, where he’s clearly saying, ‘I’m an American from New York.’ What he says is Anthony Bourdain’s world. World Café: Asia isn’t exactly my perception of the world. It’s me interacting with people, it’s cooking — he doesn’t cook in his shows — and asking questions as a chef that wants to learn from somebody.”
He gives us a taste of this at his cooking demonstration, where he whips up Bun Bo, a Vietnamese meal-in-a-bowl of sautéed beef with rice noodles and salad. Except Chinn can never resist adding a “Bobby twist” — in this case using Japanese Wagyu for the beef and serving bite-size portions of it on Chinese soupspoons. We’re also treated to grapes rolled in goats’ cheese with a pistachio crust, fresh spring rolls with a raspberry dipping sauce, tamarind-glazed crab cakes and rice pudding. Each dish is delicious, bursting with the fresh, clean flavors Chinn loves so much about Vietnamese cuisine, mixed with Middle Eastern, American and Asian references that hark back to both Chinn’s heritage and his extensive travels around the world.
“Next I want to go to Latin America and the Middle East, because those are the only places I haven’t been to,” he says.
He employs the same fusion/confusion tricks in his Restaurant Bobby Chinn, which reflects the many facets of his personality: the fine art on the walls (he’s a collector), the perfect acoustics (he’s a musician), the best assortment of tequila in Hanoi (one can assume he drinks), and rose petals in the ladies’ room (“Because women are like cats,” claims this romantic).
Chefs like Chinn — who are eager to explore cuisine halfway around the world and are sometimes a mixed gumbo of flavors themselves — are doing their part to bring Filipino food closer to mainstream tastes. All the world has to do now is watch and listen.
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World Café: Asia premieres on March 23 at 10 p.m. and airs every Monday after that on the Discovery Travel & Living channel. In the second season, host Bobby Chinn travels to cities such as Manila, Malacca, Jakarta, Yunnan and Calcutta.