Cerveseria is tops for tapas and more

MANILA, Philippines - Imagine you’re in Barcelona, basking in the warm glow of Catalonian summer while gorging on countless assorted tapas like there’s no tomorrow.

Si, señores y señoras, that’s probably the feeling you’ll get when you dine at Cerveseria, that cozy Spanish restaurant with Gothic chandeliers fashioned out of white melted candles and shelves lined with books in Greenbelt 3, Makati, where the tapas are simply tops. Think salpicao (tenderloin beef and garlic), Hamburguesa Cerveseria (mini US Black Angus hamburger with Gruyere), Chorizo Iberico con Pan con Chocolate y Avellanas (Chorizo Iberico on bread with hazelnut chocolate). But Cerveseria is not just about tapas, as I and my foodie friends, with their insatiable taste for adventure, delightfully discovered one frenetic lunchtime.

Top tapas: The Cerveseria platter is loaded with some of the best tapas in the house — chorizo, anchovy, olives, razor clams, spicy potatoes, and tomato bread.

 “My favorite place in Barcelona is called Cerveseria Catalonia; sobrang sarap ng food,” gushes Rikki Dee, seasoned restaurateur and co-owner of Cerveseria Greenbelt. “It was part of our road trip when I went to Spain with my kids. The second time, I went there with my friends. Masarap again! So I asked

Gilbert Pangilinan, Cerveseria chef and co-owner, to go there. He did, and he stayed there for almost a month, trying all the tapas bars so he can duplicate these little specialties in our resto.”

A Lunchtime Hot Spot

Note that contrary to what most people think, cerveseria does not mean a beer place; it’s Spanish for food service. Beer-y good to know that. Fact is, Cerveseria in GB 3 is fast becoming a top favorite among Greenbelt’s burgeoning lunchtime crowd.

Chef Gilbert — who’s got a diploma from the Culinary Institute of America tucked under his toque, and was a line cook at Nobu Restaurant in New York and The Savoy Hotel in London — aims to please the biggest appetites with his great little tapas (appetizers or little meals).

I’ve got a crust on you: Cerveseria makes thin paella, where you get so much flavor up to the tutong (burnt rice crust).

“In Barcelona, everything is there — it’s a lot of Catalan cooking, Basque cooking. A lot of simple, fresh ingredients,” Gilbert recalls with great relish.

Aside from Barcelona, Gilbert also went to San Sebastian to sample more glorious Spanish food. By now, his taste buds had been totally Hispanized. “I mastered Spanish food from eating it every day, I did not have any recipe books to follow. I took pictures. I think I have a taste memory — just looking at the picture of the dish, I can imagine how to cook it,” says Gilbert with a big smile.

“San Sebastian is a coastal city with lots of pinchos (bar snacks) and tapas bars,” Rikki continues to recount his Spanish gastronomic adventure. “The tapas bars stand side by side, in one long row. It’s usual that you hop from one tapas bar to another. Like, you’ll eat quail, charcuterie (a selection of cured, smoked meats) in this bar; then you move on to the next one and try the mushroom. There’s a bar only for seafood, a bar just for hams, and you end up in the dessert bar.”

When you go tapas bar hopping in Spain, you can spend as little as $10 to as much as $100 for a pound of ham (prosciutto). “They will slice it, and you can eat it plain or with bread, or wrap it around melon, vegetable, anything,”

But now, you don’t have to fly all the way to Barcelona or San Sebastian for a taste of Spanish tapas and much more.

Roast of the town: Pollo Iberico is slow-roasted for four hours. You can order it whole (P880) or half (P490).

Rikki Dee, chef Gilbert Pangilinan, and Maritel Nievera, the beauteous lady restaurateur who never runs out of innovative ideas, have put their creative heads together to bring the best Spanish dining experience — great food, fine wine, and great ambience — to the metro’s food lovers.

One Cochinillo coming right up

 Cerveseria’s certified bestseller is its cochinillo (roast suckling pig) that will probably give the other Spanish restos in town a run for their ovens.

“Spanish cooking is simple, but the main courses require slow cooking,” chef Gilbert points out. “Cochinillo is the most difficult to do. The secret is in the timing, the temperature. It took us long to master our cochinillo, it took a lot of practice. Our cochinillo is around 2.2 to 3 kilos. We put a lot of garlic, and it’s slow roasted for four to five hours.”

Cerveseria has two giant ovens that can cook 10 to 12 cochinillos at a time. Which is why you don’t have to order it a day ahead. “You just have to wait for 30 minutes,” says Gilbert.

“And the best part is you don’t have to order the whole thing, as in other restos,” says Rikki. “You don’t have to be a group of 10 people to enjoy our cochinillo. There are no Spanish restos that serve tingi like us.”

A roast by any other name: Cerveseria’s cochinillo, one of its bestsellers, is slow roasted for five hours with lots of garlic. You can order a whole cochinillo at P5,500; 1/2 at P2,800, and 1/6th at P980.

Cerverseria’s cochinillo, fresh and hot off the oven, is best paired with tomato salsa. “We don’t serve sarsa for our siding,” says Gilbert.

And what’s the other top seller at Cerveseria?

But of course, the paella!

Rikki gets to the bottom of it all: “The new-style paella is not thick. So the lower level is crunchy but the top is super moist. You have to really be a good chef to be able to produce this — crusted at the bottom but moist at the top. Most of the restos in New York do this kind of paella that’s very thin. So we’re kind of innovative, modern; not traditional Spanish.”

Thin Paella is in

He shares more delicious secrets: “The secret of our paella lies in the tutong (burnt rice crust). In all restos here, the paella is thick. Ours is thin. I discovered that in Spain, maninipis ang paella. And when you eat it, you get so much flavor.”

 “The tutong is in the middle,” says Gilbert. “You just put a little rice. We use peppers, onions, garlic to sauté the rice. We don’t scrimp on the peppers, that’s the key — these will melt and coat the rice.”

Proudly home-made: Cerverseria makes its ownhuevos rotos con tocino (fried string potatoes with eggs and bacon), P180.

Try the vegetarian paella or the Paella Cerveseria, a house specialty that’s loaded with soft-shell crabs, bacon, chorizo, prawns, and all that meaty goodness.

 Now, meat another hot fave: Cerveseria’s Wagyu steak, done the Spanish way — with Spanish sea salt, Spanish olive oil, and Spanish tomato concasse.

 Another meaty treat is the Pollo Iberico (Iberian chicken) that’s slow-roasted (about four hours) with lots of garlic.

“A lot of our ingredients are from Spain,” says Rikki. “We use only Spanish olive oil for cooking. Our hams are from Spain, our chorizos from Bilbao and Pamplona. We also have Manchego cheese.”

Cerveseria also serves a mouthwatering goat cheese platter from Davao with four dips (pesto, olives, tomato salsa, truffle honey, which is truly the best).

“We want to use local ingredients, too,” Rikki and Gilbert tell us.

Tapas Decision

Can’t decide what tapas to order? Now, that could be the tapas decision of your life! Why not order the tapas platter that’s got so much to offer? It’s a platter full of chorizos fritos, boquerones fritos (fried baby anchovy with garlic aioli), navajas a la plancha (baby razor clams sauted in olive oil), patatas bravas (potatoes in spicy tomato sauce and aioli), aceitunas marinadas (marinated olives), and pan con tomate (toast with tomato).

Don’t forget to leave room for the dulce (dessert). The sinful selection (you can confess right after as the Greenbelt Chapel is just a hop, skip, and jump away) includes the good old canonigo (baked meringue dripping with caramelized sugar), churros con chocolate (Spanish doughnut dipped in thick Spanish hot chocolate), caramelized banana with raspberry ice cream, rice pudding with coffee ice cream, Crema Catalana (Spanish custard that’s Catalan’s version of the French crème brulee), chocoflan (choco fudge topped with leche flan.

Grilled to thrill: Tocino a la plancha (grilled bacon with arugula), P210 Photos by WALTER BOLLOZOS

Si, enjoy your drinks, too. Order a fruit shake (watermelon green mango, ripe mango red apple, melon raspberry, blue banana, apple and pear) or sangria, mojito, beer or wine.

After work, enjoy a little night of cocktails and the buy-one, take-one promo on local beers. And let the good times pour by staying till past 10 p.m. and savoring the best of the ’80s music dished out by your favorite DJs on Wednesday and Friday nights.

So, how did I and my foodie friends like the food at Cerveseria?

 Simply delicioso! Hasta la vista, amigos!

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Eat, drink and be merry at Cerveseria, located at the ground floor, Greenbelt 3, Ayala Center, Makati City with telephone number 757-4791. It is open every day from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m.