Chewing Guam
MANILA, Philippines - Maila ta fan boka (Come, let’s eat)! Now, who can resist such a mouthwatering invitation? And so, with assorted epicurean thoughts simmering in our minds, we board a Continental Airlines’ evening flight to Guam to attend the Maila Ta Fan Boka Festival 2010 from May 6 to 8. Imagine three days of binging! Fact is, the binging begins right here, at the lounge of Continental Airlines in NAIA, where our lethargic taste buds are roused by the sight of the chicken barbecue and arroz caldo, among other viands kept deliciously warm in the chafing dishes. But it’s just a sneak peek of (gastronomic) things to come.
Haf adai! These big words of welcome greet our half-sleepy eyes at the Guam airport on a bright and early Saturday morning. Our tour guide/driver Billy whisks us off to Fiesta Resort, our home sweet hotel in Guam for the next three days.
The Guamanians welcome us into their homes and into their hearts. It’s like we never left home. The gateway to America, Guam is barely three hours by plane (or just a pocketbook and a movie away) from Manila — and only two hours ahead of us. The weather is bright and sunny just like home — okay, make that a bit hotter than home. The people are as happy and fun-loving as most Filipinos. Guam’s national flower is the bougainvilla (puti tai nobio) that blooms in many hues to add color to the island’s landscape. (But if you can’t spell bougainvilla, you can always settle for a rose that Guam also has aplenty.) And yes, the food is so much like ours. Endearingly familiar are their pancit and lumpia, which the indigenous Chamorros borrowed from Guam’s Filipino settlers. Do you know how they call their dinuguan? They call it adobo! They love to barbecue; they don’t need an excuse to have a barbecue party. They roast their own suckling pig. And as is the common practice in a Filipino gathering, you never leave a Guamanian home without a balutan (take-home food).
During our brief stay in Guam, we would acquaint our taste buds with good old Chamorro cooking whose multi-cultural influences (from the Spaniards who made the place their home after it was discovered by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 to the Japanese who occupied the island during World War II to the Americans who’ve lived there since the ’40s to their Asian neighbors like the Filipinos) have left a delicious imprint on Guamanian food. Our food vocabulary would grow — and so would our waistlines — to include such words as: fina denne (a mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, onions, and hot pepper, which you can use on meat, rice or just about anything you want to spice up); kelaguen (chicken, shrimp or beef chopped up, then seasoned with salt, lemon juice, onions, grated coconut, and crushed hot pepper); titiyas (pancake-like treat made with young coconut); red rice (rice cooked in achote seed, which gives it a dark color and usually cooked with onions).
Says Pilar Laguaña, marketing manager of Guam Visitors Bureau, “Maila Ta Fan Boka Festival 2010 showcases the traditional dishes that have satisfied local families for more than 500 years. Fresh fish, marinated pork barbecue and red rice are just a snapshot of the role our super table has played in Guam’s history…”
Thus, during our Guamanian sojourn, we would have a delicious taste of Chamorro history. But first things first, where did all this glorious food come from? To answer our question, we visit some of Guam’s farms. Most Guam farms range from 1/2 to 2 acres. It is on these farms where we would find how the Guamanian farmers grow those luscious ingredients that go into the Chamorro homecooking — from the sweetest corn we’ve ever sank our teeth into to the hottest hot peppers to the most aromatic herbs to the fattest tilapia and bangus. We have the distinct pleasure of meeting gentlemen-farmers who plant everything by hand. There’s Gabriel Guerrero who grows fruits and vegetables in Dededo, Guam; Ernie Wusstig who grows his best-selling and sweetest-tasting sweet corn on the slopes of his 60-acre Barrigada farm which he shares with his two sons; Ike Guerrero whose two-acre farm is planted to assorted herbs, calamansi, avocado, and papaya; Marilyn Salas who started just giving away her bananas to friends and family and now grows 1,200 pounds of banana a month on her farm in Umatac, Guam. And then there’s Ching-Hua Wang who breeds tilapia, shrimp, milkfish (yes, bangus), catfish in his 11 ponds in Talofofo, Guam.
Of course, every farm visit is capped by food. For instance, at Ernie Wusstig’s farm, they whip up a most delicious lunch consisting of grilled corn (which we picked ourselves) and jackfruit, roast chicken, spare ribs, spring rolls, eggplant salad, and cassava cake and red carrot cake for dessert. And at the Salas farm, we go bananas over Marilyn’s various banana specialties, washed down with a warm drink made of young coconut, coconut juice, sugar, and tapioca. The hostess with the mostest, Marilyn loves cooking — and singing/playing the guitar — for her guests.
Bananas make a sweet finale to a filling Guamanian meal. For our last dinner in Guam, Frank Kenney, president and co-owner of Jamaican Grill, lets us taste the resto’s roast banana split. He relates, “When we were thinking of what to do for dessert, one guy suggested, ‘Why don’t you throw a banana on the grill?’ There’s no sugar added as the banana caramelizes on the grill.”
This banana dessert is a perfect way to end a Jamaican meal that consists of Kingston barbecue chicken, grilled mahi-mahi, Jamaican rice/red rice. Frank intimates, “For our mixes, we use Mama Sita from the Philippines.”
No wonder it tastes familiar!
And if the chefs at some of the finest hotels in Guam look Filipino, it’s because they are. For instance, we meet senior sous chef Roger Reyes and chef Joel Arañaz of the new Fisherman’s Cove with a seafood market in Hilton Guam Resort & Spa, where you can have your food cooked and seasoned just the way you like it.
We meet more kababayans at the Maila Ta Fan Boka culinary competition, like Mark Daniel Cruz, Kia del Rosario, Geremiah Ngan, Alain Bernabe, Nadine Madrigal, and Sherry Go of the Pacific Islands Club Bistro.
According to the Guam Visitors Bureau, the Maila Ta Fan culinary competition “is focused on bringing our local cuisine based on local recipes up a notch or bringing home-grown produce from the farm to the kitchen and on to the table. It is a collaboration between the Guam Farmers CoOp, Micronesian Chefs Association, Guam Hotel and Restaurant Association, and Guam Visitors Bureau. It will stimulate community pride, transmit island culture, and convey a positive concept of Guam’s unique local cuisine.” And of course, bring more tourists in. Over 1.1 million tourists come to Guam every year — the top three tourists are the Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese.
For this year’s competition, our two food experts/editors Isabel de Leon and Lorraine Timbol are picked to sit on the esteemed panel of judges in the professional category. The irrepressible ladies have as much fun eating as judging.
Ernie Galito, Guam Visitors Bureau deputy general manager, notes, “Maila Ta Fan Boka was launched in 2004. Part of our brand initiative to get community support to really espouse tourism is to articulate that we have to really promote what we like and how we share with our visitors. So we like to eat, we like to dance, we like to show our hospitality. This is why we’re getting a lot of support from all the villages in Guam — we see that our village mayors really embrace this concept and we can see tourists going to the villages. Before, tourists were limited to the Tumon beach area — that’s where the shopping, the water sports activities, a lot of restaurants are. But we found out that our restaurants really serve local food and that’s what really explains our culture. So we want to encourage entrepreneurs, hotels, and restaurants to put local food items on their menu, like our chicken kelaguen, tatiyas, even things that we got from the Philippines (pancit, lumpia). Those things have been ingrained in our diet because we have a large population of Filipino residents here — a lot of Filipinos call Guam their home now. And so we’ve infused their favorite food into Guam’s favorite food. So if you go to any fiesta, you’ll see lumpia, pancit, either pancit bihon or pancit canton. So those are favorite foods now. Guam and the Philippines have shared history for over 300 years. Yes, we call them by the same names, with a little variation in pronunciation like potu for your puto. The recipes are basically the same. We didn’t have emphasis on local culture as we do now. And also, this engages the community, we want to engage the community. Before, because we had such huge numbers of people coming to Guam, we didn’t have to promote the culture because we got the visitor numbers already. But now, the landscape has changed, it’s very competitive. There are more niche destinations opening up — in the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam. Ten years ago, China wasn’t available for tourism. Now, a lot of people go to China. Tourists’ attitude has changed, too. During Japan’s bubble years, people were conspicuous consumers, they bought name brand goods, they wanted to buy a lot of things they couldn’t buy in Japan. Now, that has changed. They want to put emphasis on a collection of experiences, not on a collection of things. So a good experience to them is eating local food, sharing local traditions, watching local performers.”
The Guamanians are mighty proud of their Chamorro roots. “They’re our indigenous people,” says Ernie. “There are no pure Chamorros anymore, just as there are no more pure Hawaiians. But many people here have Chamorro lineage and they also have Filipino lineage. Our population is 170,000 and the Filipino population is about 26 percent of that. The Filipinos are in hospitality, accounting, engineering, construction, nursing.”
To our most generous Guamanian hosts, we say a collective “dangkulo na si yuus maase” (thank you very much).
Surely, chewing Guam is one habit that’ll be hard to kick.
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Continental Airlines flies from Manila to Guam and Guam to Manila with direct daily flight Monday to Sunday and with one stopover via Palau Wednesday and Friday. Its Go Guam Holidays 2010 offers packages that include airfare, two nights’ hotel accommodation, airport-hotel-airport transfers, and daily breakfast at hotel. For more information, call Continental Airlines at 818-8701 to 05 or 233-7533 in Cebu City.
