Saying Goodbye To An Old Friend

Actually, I’ve said goodbye twice, and I should’ve known this second time was coming; the signs were there.

Yesterday, Chateau 1771 held a farewell party at its El Pueblo location in Ortigas Center, Pasig for one more rousing bash before its hearth goes permanently cold and its doors close for good. After a dozen years in this bustling part of town, a stone’s throw from Megamall, Chateau is packing up and moving to Makati – for me an unfamiliar, almost alien part of town (I tell people, even those from Ayala which developed most of it, that I need a visa to go there). I therefore take this transfer as a betrayal of sorts, or at least an abandonment.

I found Chateau many years ago when it was located at 1771 M. Adriatico Street, just off Remedios Circle and near the Toda apartment building where a friend used to live. It was a wonderful restaurant with lots of wood and old glass and crisp white tablecloth, and wonderful food that was down home and Filipino, but not so ethnic it would freak foreign palates. I’d bring visiting friends there, for early or late dinners before or after shows at the CCP.

In the course of these lunches and dinners I got to know the owners: the irrepressible Ricky Gutierrez, whose sometimes off-kilter humor and barreling laugh makes him the perfect host, and then some! And chef Vicky Rose Pacheco, who is, in contrast to Ricky, rather quiet and very serious about her food and who is responsible for the many items on the menu that have become classics. (Both have since become friends; Ricky especially, who you can always count on for brilliant but sometimes wacky ideas, plus an inexhaustible supply of humor and snide asides.) 

Classics like lemon chicken, often copied but never duplicated, it’s what you order when you don’t quite know what you want to eat, because you know you will not be disappointed. And coffee pie, the dessert equivalent of lemon chicken, it’s what you have when you want a sure, good, end-of-the-meal treat.

The old house on Adriatico, which grew out of the family pensione behind, at some point expanded with a lovely glass house next door, shaded by the nice old tree on the compound. Chateau 1771 became Portico, a dinner place with large Phyllis Zaballero paintings, when Chateau itself moved out to Ortigas Center. This arrangement was great for us, being near the office so we could have our lunches at the glass house (until it stopped serving lunch) and late dinners at Portico, especially when we had guests.

The first goodbye came about last year, when the glass house was leased out to a coffee chain, and Portico packed its pots and pans and headed for Serendra at the new development that was Fort Bonifacio. I raised a howl with Ricky – and how! – but the realities of business beat out my cravings for spring tofu and lemon chicken.

Anyway we had Chateau at Ortigas, and that was great, because we would have our lunch after church (which was two blocks away) every Sunday. That was the only place I could get my goddaughter to eat her veggies: Sunday after Sunday we had our Caesar’s salad, then she had her lemon chicken and I had my tomato soup, and we shared coffee pie and lemon meringue torte, the latter messy to eat but oh so good!

Then they stopped opening on Sundays, which was a major bummer (my goddaughter is back to not eating her veggies). Soon after they stopped opening for Saturday lunch as well, and I should have read the signs and prepared myself for the inevitable.

Ricky argues that Serendra and Greenbelt 5 aren’t really that far; which is true, but it isn’t a matter of geographical distance at all: Caesar’s salad and lemon chicken, not to mention coffee pie and lemon meringue torte, are not just items on a menu (I was assured that the food would be the same, plus more new items, in the relocated restaurant), but a state of mind and stomach, comfort food in a reassuring, familiar ambiance.