In the company of fine china

On Maria Orosa Street in Malate, near the corner of J. Nakpil, is perhaps an oxymoron of a restaurant that specializes in fine Chinese dining, or cuisine Chinoise. Say what? Leave it to Malate, where there is even a street called Paris, to come up with Courtyard restaurant, devoid of any funky lazy susans, viands overflowing from the plate and placed recklessly on the table, or greasy rags that have seen better days.

Leave it to manager Ferdie Ong, an engineering graduate from La Salle, and business partners DJ Montano and designer Ed Calma to think up Courtyard, a place where diners can get a taste of China without having to go through the winding streets of Chinatown, Binondo. While it’s possible to hear the clip-clop of horse-drawn calesas through the piped-in music of Diana Krall or Stacey Kent as you take a bite out of the Com Pao prawns or the Mayor Lito Atienza favorite, Hong Ma with Mien Pao, that could very well be the percussion reverberating in the place’s fine acoustics.

So we can hardly blame our nearly toothless yet very hungry mouths for savoring a medley of four dishes prepared by the Courtyard cook, a veteran in the business who at this time must remain nameless, but who Ong confides was responsible for the special sauce in Mr. Poon and which secret concoction has now been transposed in the present restaurant’s Squirrel Fish.

And as our intrepid photographer takes close-up shots and still-life like spreads of the prawns, humba and asado-like Hong Ma with the steamed bread Mien Pao, minced chicken with mango and lettuce, and the mixed seafood with bean curd in hotpot, the better to titillate the visual senses before the entire company demolishes the comestible quartet washed down with two kinds of ice tea–lemon-grass and raspberry, we engage the amiable Ong in a hearty tête-à-tête on the history of Courtyard, and what led to this very fulfilling meal.

During conversation Ong graciously allows us to partake of rose tea in informal man-on-the-street ceremony, including smelling the receptacle where the tea was placed before it was transposed into the small teacup. One doesn’t know subtle unless one goes through the rose tea ceremony–no breaking of cups afterwards.

It must have been late last year when Ong and his business buddies as well his mom went on a field cum food trip to various places in China, the mainland, with the very idea of scouting for dishes to be served in a Chinese restaurant in the Philippines.

"There was one place where all they served was crabs," recalls Ong about a restaurant where the menu from the entrees down to the main course and perhaps even dessert was crab, from aligue on down to the sweet pincers of the delectable crustacean.

The research team sampled both the toniest restaurants in Shanghai, to the turo-turos and holes in the wall in Canton, to the mid-range eateries in Szechuan and the hotels in Peking nee Beijing, in a nearly interminable ambulant lauriat of lumpias, pancit, assorted noodle dishes and duck, among others that evoked memory of the imaginary homeland.

The dry run for Courtyard, whose arresting logo was designed by Wendy Puyat, was held early this year, where about a dozen friends formed an impromptu team of food samplers and taste testers for 20 dishes a night for a week, with their check lists and the subsequent debates that lasted into the small hours to draw up the final menu, more or less.

Nagsawa kami sa pagkain, Ong relates, but admits it was an experience.

These days the menu itself, except for the tried and tested favorites like soup # 5 ("a real aphrodisiac" says Ong as compared to some fake sidewalk concoctions) and drunken chicken (which has a Boholanon counterpart in manok-tin, or chicken cooked in fresh tuba), can be flexible, as there are a couple of customers who prefer bamboo shoots or beef and broccoli even if the dishes are unlisted.

"Even if we don’t have it we’ll try to get it for you," says Ong, adding the Courtyard regulars don’t have to lift a finger to catch the waiter’s attention and what they usually order will be served them, unless otherwise specified.

"There is also no MSG in our food, unless the customer specifically requests for it," Ong points out, when asked how else Courtyard departs from the stereotype Chinese cuisine.

But this wouldn’t be a Chinese restaurant without the daring experimental dishes, in this case pork brain nuggets, a favorite of drinkers, who can load on their preferred local brew at the reduced price of P40 per bottle on most evenings. Another staple pulutan would be frog’s legs, which as the saying goes, "tastes like chicken."

Sampling the spread prepared by the Courtyard cook, we had to be restrained from digging directly into the serving bowls with our chop-sticks (sorry about that, force of habit), as Ong was quick to provide serving spoons, the better to accentuate the fine dining ambience while in the vicinity we could gaze at an eight-foot aquarium filled with lazily swimming carp, and at the same time ruminate on the latest developments in the war against terror. Bush coming over to visit? Burp. Al-Ghozi killed in a purported shootout? Double burp.

Any rhapsody of adjectives is useless when trying to describe the repast at Courtyard, except that the place has been around for the past 10 months or so, and there’s a tall dead tree across the street from its front door, and that the meal served us could make even our gums happy.

Well Ong, who runs a hoi polloi ihaw-ihaw on Pioneer in Pasig ("funny how a lot of things begin with barbecue") and concurrently manages an Italian high-end furniture business, has more plans for his baby, such as an acoustic night on weekends, to attract the younger, not necessarily jologs crowd who want to enjoy their meal and drink with live music.

"You don’t have to go anywhere," he says, referring to people in search of Chinese food and a plain quiet good time, because "our wine list is complete".

It’s a perfect hideaway, and Ong relates how couples are left to their devices in the evenings they want to spend alone, away from the prying eyes of an ersatz city.

Of course we’d been there before, when it was a different restaurant or pub, on the second floor veranda overlooking Orosa and a stone’s throw away from Nakpil, coming from an evening of poetry and full of wine and song, which could still very well be the case in its present incarnation of a Courtyard and its taste of fine china.