Impressions of an Iron Chef: Geoffrey Zakarian cooks his way into Pinoy hearts

MANILA, Philippines – “I can’t pronounce what I had,” Chef Geoffrey says. We’re politely sympathetic, and we chuckle. He’s taking about what Filipino dishes he’s tried in the two days he’s been here. He calls out to the back of the room, addressing Sofitel’s Executive Chef. “Eric! What did I have for breakfast yesterday?”

We all laugh. Iron Chef Geoffrey Zakarian had bangus, beef tapa and tocino all in one breakfast. He’s on a tight schedule, with the Feast of Colours happening that night, but at the press event he is calm and collected. He’s having trouble pronouncing things like lechon, sigarilyas and Pangilinan, but he is unfazed and honest. He is used to being in front of the camera; he’s a Food Network star.

Still, what he’s doing here is a new deal — a five-course meal for around 700 guests with proceeds to go to the Philippine Disaster Recovery Foundation. He’s flown in from New York, where he is a famed restaurateur. Filipinos are not unfamiliar with him, if not through his recurring appearances in Food Network shows then probably through his own staff. In at least one of his restaurants, aboard a cruise line, the employees are all Filipino.

“I remember meeting them, and it struck me that everybody was incredibly happy,” Chef Geoffrey says. Like all seasoned TV personalities, he tells a good story. He talks about the Filipina who raised his kids back at home. “A wonderful woman,” he says of her. “Our babies are calm, and they sleep at night, and they eat well — and it’s all because of Ana.” So he’s no stranger to adobo at all, and he says his family has practically been raised on it. “She has four sons, and they’re all surgeons,” Chef Geoffrey tells us. “Isn’t that amazing?”

But the point of the press launch is to give the media a little preview — and pre-taste —of the main event’s feast. The exclusive gala, organized by “living magazine channel” Colours and Cignal Digital TV, has actually been an anticipated coming. Cignal had been courting the Iron Chef since last year, and in fact already had plans to bring him over for a grand event.

Cignal TV Managing Director Annie Naval, Iron Chef Geoffrey Zakarian, and PDRF President Rene ‘Butch’ Meily

“It’s just that when all the disasters happened we felt that it was not yet the right time,” explains Cignal TV Managing Director Annie Naval. “So now that the areas that were devastated are now recovering, we feel this is the right time — so that we don’t forget.”

“As you all know, we had fighting in Zamboanga, we had a 7.2 magnitude earthquake in Bohol, then we had a Super Typhoon Yolanda,” says PDRF President Butch Meily, naming the most recent of our major disasters. The organization started sometime between 2009 and 2010, right after Typhoon Ondoy, and has five clusters of focus:  environment, education, shelter, WISH (standing for water, infrastructure, sanitation, health), and disaster training. “[We are] the world’s first, and the Philippines’ first, year-round private sector disaster-response organization,” Meily explains.

The foundation is composed of most of the major business groups in the country, and has in addition partnered with many organizations, both locally and internationally. “And we don’t focus on just one disaster,” Meily adds. “We’re trying to be very transparent about it, and who’s getting what.” He says that the United Nations has held them up as an example of how the private sector can do their part to help. “So I want to thank all the executives of Cignal and satellite TV, for doing all this without really being asked.”

He gives an example what they can do. “We’ve looked into the possibility of earthquake in Metro Manila, and so we’ve partnered with a Canadian rescue firm to offer packages to companies, barangays, and cities, which we will partly fund, so that they can train their people to be ready in case an earthquake hits Manila or in case of high-rise fires in areas like Makati or Bonifacio Global City.”

Naval reiterates that “we wanted to partner with PDRF since before.” But she archly maintains that she is, like many people here, a fan of Geoffrey Zakarian. It amuses the chef as much as it thrills him; he states that the gala “allows me to get in touch with a remote yet loyal part of my fan base that I have not yet had the chance to interact with in person.”

And so Chef Geoffrey does the demonstration. He does it easily, despite the cameras poking in as he speaks. He does have some assistance (“This is Eric Hau, everybody. He basically does everything.”), but it is his personality that really makes the plate. The pork belly, he says, has been cooked slowly for all of seventeen hours, so that “the meat just gently goes to sleep.” He whips up a glaze for the pork belly, with an adobo sauce he dubs “a kind of Filipino barbeque sauce.” He makes a cold salad on the side out of endive. “Because endive for me has that bitterness,” he says, coating it with butter and spices.

Chef Geoffrey balances out his cooking with little observations about our food that keep us hanging on. “What I noticed here is the incredible range of vinegars that is used here,” he says, almost offhandedly, marvelling at the fragrance as he cooks. Later, he talks about mangoes as he adds a lightly pickled mango to the dish. “When I first arrived here the chef was kind enough to send me up some mangoes,” he says. “They’re amazing. We don’t have these kinds of mangoes in the States, it’s like eating pure honey and sugar.”

He goes back to the pork belly and adds something he calls “a little nod to the Philippines” — rice. “It doesn’t look very appetizing, but all this is, is rice that we fried. So we put a little of this crunchy rice on this soft pork that’s marinated in this beautiful sauce… so what you have is something that mimics the crispiness of the skin without having the skin.”

When the dish is finished, it is pronounced: adobo-glazed pork belly, with citrus-glazed endive. “We have sweet, sour, crispy, crunchy — so when you eat it I hope you understand the texture we’re trying to have in both sides of the dish. And for me this is a perfect lunch entrée, and when you eat it, I think it’s a very complete dish.”

There’s applause, and then a brief Q&A. He answers the usual necessary queries like a pro — (what Filipino food did you like best? are we going to see a restaurant of yours here in Manila anytime soon? ‘I’ve been here two whole days! [laugh] I would love to… I think anybody in their right mind would want to come here and invest. I hope to open a restaurant one day, but it’s a long way to come for one. So I should build a couple, maybe.’) — but it is striking how much he fits into the event’s ethos. He is prompted into talking about his personal advocacies, and he says he is the president of the food council of City Harvest.

The strong belief in the power of the private sector to make a difference probably makes him more well-suited to the Feast of Colours than people realize. “City Harvest is a New York based charity. It’s 100 percent private… we gather companies, corporations, supermarkets, and all the food with timestamps on them, that are on what we call the death day, and can’t be sold legally, what we do is we gather all that food and we give it away in incredibly smart and efficient ways, with trucks that go up and down the streets all day long.” There are people in New York, he says, who go hungry, believe it or not. “I think last year we gave away 65 million pounds of food.”

Chef Geoffrey continues, to explain a little more about it, how all the food collected is neither too processed nor overly sugared. “They’re all past the expiration date by one day, they’re perfectly fine to use but those that don’t sell them have to get rid of them. It’s been around for almost 20 years.” He smiles, as though glad the question came up. “It’s my personal charity, and it’s doing what I do every day, which is feeding people.”

It’s with the same easy, almost relaxed attitude he seems to approach the night’s Feast of Colours. “I think we’re raising north of a million bucks tonight,” Chef Geoffrey says, “so it’s a big deal.” Whether it is because he is allowing the gravity of the event’s purpose to matter more or simply because he is too used to large scale events to show much stress, he doesn’t seem worried. In fact he talks more about the meals he’s had, and how he looks forward to his next lunch. One does not really get the impression he has to prepare five courses for 700 people in an event serenaded by the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra happening later that evening.

Someone asks what “convinced” Chef Geoffrey to come here, and he seems surprised this has to be stated. “Coming here to me was very natural,” he says. “With Yolanda — with what’s happened here, and how this dinner was generously set up here, that was all you needed to tell me. It wasn’t a hard decision.”

The bonus, of course, is in being able to travel here for the first time. “We’ve definitely seen some things here that we thought were very interesting,” he says, in response to a question of more Filipino-inspired dishes in his restaurants. “Especially some of the sauces.” He honestly can’t pronounce a lot of it, but it’s all “amazing.” With only two days in a new country and the brutal miasma of jet lag still on him, nobody really blames him for mispronouncing things. When he struggles to remember that the fruit he had was a star-apple, though, we have to laugh. “Sorry, I’m not an Iron Chef here in the Philippines,” he says, rueful but good-humored. “I’m a Bronze Chef.”

It ends with a lot of flashing cameras. Chef Geoffrey even sticks around for personal photos. We’re all pretty cowed, like we’ve all just learned what it means to be a celebrity chef. Later we’re even going to get signed copies of his book. In the meantime, though, we’re left to enjoy the pork belly.