Dreaming of Silk

In San Francisco, Silks evokes the best of California cuisine. It is the restaurant on the second floor of the Mobil-Five Star Mandarin Oriental, San Francisco, which is known for its stunning interiors and exquisite food. In a matter of days, the name could become a byword among Manila’s discerning foodies and gastronomes, when The Tivoli at Mandarin Oriental, Manila, with the support of Northwest Airlines, introduces Silks to its customers on August 6 to 19.

The visit of the much-acclaimed Bay Area restaurant whose name conjures Marco Polo’s journey along the Silk Road, comes to fruition after months of planning, e-mail exchanges and long distance calls between the kitchens of Mandarin Oriental, Manila and the San Francisco hotel.

"We are excited to give Manila’s food cognoscenti and cosmopolitan set a taste of Silks’ intriguing cuisine, which has consistently received top honors in the U.S.," says Mandarin Oriental, Manila’s Food and Beverage Director Daniel Dolatre. An understatement perhaps, about a restaurant which has received various accolades from food arbiters, including the top award for best hotel restaurant in the U.S. (along with Hoku’s, the main dining room of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Kahala, Honolulu) from Conde Nast Traveler in its 2000 Business Travel supplement.

The 2001 Zagat Guide describes Silks as a "classy sleeper...that offers excellent, innovative" California cuisine. Thomas Wilmer of Arizona Foothills magazine has referred to Silks’ cuisine as "orgasmically good" and similar praises from Chris Rubin of California Homes magazine.

Silks’ Californian cuisine is as divine as it can get, adds Norbert Gandler, Executive Chef of Mandarin Oriental, Manila, himself a recognized culinary titan, as he describes the restaurant’s contemporary American cuisine. The cuisine with Pacific Rim influence reflects California’s passion for the best produce prepared in the least intrusive manner yet in imaginative styles, to enhance their flavor and intensity. At Silks, new and unusual ingredients inspire the chefs, such as the Japanese lemon-ish fruit yuzu which reigns supreme on the menu. Its juice or rind is used innovatively–to counteract a spicy prawn dish, mixed with mango as a sauce to complement hamachi; or combined with curry as a vinaigrette to bring out the sweetness of lobster in a chilled fennel salad.

The lowly potato gets more than a cameo role–as a warm blini to match house-smoked salmon, or combined with sea scallops and matched with pineapple and orange burre blanc, as a citrus heirloom potato hash with tarragon, or as a ginger potato confit as sidings for grilled US rib-eye steak.

So, if you are a gastronome who believes that California cuisine is unrivaled, hie off to The Tivoli. Picture yourself kicking off your meal with tuna foie gras terrine, followed perhaps by asparagus with goat cheese gratin served with oven-dried tomato, braised leeks, balsamic vinaigrette. You may see yourself diving into roasted Chilean sea bass in light tomato broth which comes with smoked shrimp wantons and shitake bacon, and demo-lishing vanilla bean panacotta with Grand Marnier drunken berries.

A peek at the The Tivoli’s menu for the next two weeks will reveal other delightful discoveries, such as seared ahi tuna with shitake rice cake and say ginger glaze; Japanese hamachi served with black forbidden rice and mango-yuzu neri sauce, duet of beef tenderloin and truffled lobster tail, seared veal chop, Thai marinated lamb loin. And for dessert, dig into coconut creme brulee with bananas, or something as simple as strawberry shortcake with vanilla ice cream, to name some.

Mandarin Oriental, San Francisco has sent one of its Silks chefs, Jay Plourde, for the Tivoli promotion. Jay, who is in his 30s, received a Culinary Excellence Award together with the hotel’s executive chef and chef de cuisine, from the American Tasting Institute. A graduate with top honors from the Florida Culinary Institute in West Palm Beach, he received an Associate Degree in Culinary Art Technology. He worked at the Mobil-Five Star Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach before returning home to Connecticut where he helped open his sister’s bakery, before joining a restaurant in West Hartford. He then decided to move west, and joined Mandarin Oriental, San Francisco.

The impressionable chef credits much of his success to Charlie Palmer, consulting chef at Silks from 1998 to1999, who constantly reminded him of his motto, "Never serve anything you wouldn’t serve our own mother."

After the Silks experience at The Tivoli, chef Jay wishes that guests would one day make their own gastronomic journey to Silks in San Francisco where dining in its periwinkle blue banquette chairs beneath hand-painted silk chandeliers might bring them to even more divine heights, as Marco Polo must have felt when he discovered silk.