Cook it right

MANILA, Philippines - For more than 25 years, Café Ysabel, the fine dining landmark along P. Guevarra Street in Greenhills, San Juan, has delighted food aficionados and fusion lovers with excellent quality cuisine. It has been consistently awarded, reviewed and included in the roster of top restaurants in international guides for more than two decades.

Chef Gene Gonzalez has also authored recipe books and barista guides (the latest being Tropical Cocktails: Exciting Bar Drinks for the Beach Party).

Chef Gene is a management consultant for major food companies and is also F&B consultant for several bistros and hotels. He is a conseiller culinaire of the National Board of the Chaine des Rotisseurs and a member of the London-based International Wine and Food Society. He is also a founding member of Alta Cocina Filipina, a culinary group which aims to promote Philippine cuisine and to further elevate its standards in relation to international food trending.

Chef Gene has parlayed his gourmet skills and marketing savvy to expand his culinary kingdom further. As a visionary, he has founded the Center for Asian Culinary Studies (CACS), which specializes in Asian, European, and fusion cuisine. Located near Café Ysabel, CACS is considered by many aspiring cooks as their “passport to a new and exciting culinary career” anywhere in the world.

It was during the kitchen construction for Buenisimo when chef Gene discovered an amazing new cookware that’s at par with the ones he used abroad. 

Upon using these wares last year, with iron-chef precision and grit on the grill (at times 16-hours straight), chef Gene determined how reliable and durable these new cookware were — namely, Cookworks (18/10 Stainless Steel) and Maxim Duranium (Teflon Platinum Coated Non Stick Aluminum).

He sees Cookworks and Maxim Duranium as the best global-quality series of cookware. The well-researched design and strong material of these brands are a huge technological leap from what our ancestral kusinero used — the provincial kaldero which, Chef Gene relates, would unfortunately last for only about a month with the high-energy caliber of today’s industrious chef; not to mention the olden kawali’s rough wooden handles which in the long run could prove unsanitary to the user.

After Cookworks and Maxim Duranium passed his kitchen tests with frying colors (so to speak), chef Gene looked up the supplier of the two brands. “I searched everywhere in order to find the source of these cookwares,” chef Gene says.

Chef Gene is connected with the team behind Cookworks & Maxim. After initial talks with the firm’s marketing manager, Hiren Mirchandani, and its president, Haresh Mirchandani, chef Gene invited them to be partners with CACS when it comes to the school’s consistent use of Cookworks 18/10 Stainless Steel and the Teflon Platinum non- stick line, Maxim Duranium.