Stagiaire

Here's my take on why Filipino food hasn't really taken off outside of the Philippines, actually a confluence of factors: 1) Philippine cuisine is primarily "peasant food" but not in a pejorative sense. Unlike other Asian countries witha history of "elevated" cuisine from which to draw inspiration for restaurant style food (i.e. Imperial/Royal cuisines of China, Thailand, Japan, etc.), Philippine cuisine simply evolved from everyday cooking of the common folk. Everything is served family style with nary a thought given to presentation. It is actually not presentation friendly. 2) Most of the dishes are braises and stews or other heavily sauced dishes. And the sauces, for the most part, are very runny/liquid. This makes the dishes hard to plate, especially for individual service (vs. family style). At the end of the day, plating is not really a part of the food culture. 3) Rice is a major part of a Filipino meal. Filipino food actually is seasoned aggressively due to the fact that rice will be eaten with all the dishes. This adds an additional dimension to difficulty in plating...having to serve a separate bowl of rice or having that same glob of rice on every plate doesn't quite lend itself to fine dining. 4) Even in the Philippines, there are very few examples of local fine dining restaurants, I guess for the most part due to the reasons stated above. It then makes it hard to "export" something that you do not really have to begin with. For the most part, Filipinos east Filipino food at home, and go out to have Thai, Japanese, Chinese, French, etc. 5) Philippine cuisine itself isn't as "Asian" as the rest of its Asian neighbors. Normally Asian food is characterized by light, bright, refreshing food. Filipino food goes against that notion and is thus harder to qualify. The influence of the Spanish who occupied the Philippines for 400 years is very evident in the cuisine, and a Asians actually find it more Western than Asian although it has some similarity to Malay cuisine. 6) At the end of the day, again due to the reasons above, most restaurants opened outside of the Philippines cater mostly to the Filipinos in the area and tend to be downmarket. Cendrillon might be an exception but I don't really consider Cendrillon to be authentic despite what (Gary) Barawidan states several pages back. I actually worked with him at some point (and we've actually had this discussion) and know that he's born and raised in NY so his reference is Filipino food in NY. I believe that 2 things need to happen before Filipino food goes mainstream (1) first it must go through a process of refinement which is slowly happening now in the Philippines (in the past few years, a whole generation of Filipino youngsters have gone to cooking schools all over the world, learned french technique for the most part and are now applying it to Filipino cuisine...no more boiling to death as is normally the case...simmering is beginning to enter the culinary vocabulary). A Filipino restaurant rennaissance has been taking place in Manila (the capital of the Philippines) and Filipino food has never been better nor more exciting. (2) a lot more thought must be put into presentation (especially in the prep phase where it would actually make the most impact on plating) before its ready for its international debut. And I say this because admittedly Filipino food is hard to appreciate from a non-Filipino perspective. (I can explain this further if it doesn't quite make sense to you) Somewhere on the 2nd page, SKChai makes sense of all of this and I wholeheartedly agree with him. === A few comments on several other posts: Soba, - "adobong rellenong" isn't a dish. I think what you were trying to get at was Adobong Manok which is chicken adobo. You might be confusing it with Rellenong Manok. Manok = Chicken, Relleno = reference to a ground stuffing preparation. - The indian version of adobo (with coconut milk) you refer to is actually an adobo variation from the south (Bicol and Visayas, I think) and has it's influences coming more from Malaysia and Indonesia rather than India. - The peeled hard boiled egg is usually a component of another (though similar looking) dish called asado. At least that's what I've seen. === Pan and others, - ube is actually purple yam and it has more in common with Camote/Kamote than potatoes or taro. === oh, and the correct terms and spellings are Philippine, Philippines, and Filipino.

Saffron aioli is great with crabcakes!

Well, that would depend on how you define cooked. Remember that the lobster is first blanched before it is cooked sous vide. The entire lobster is opaque, nothing is translucent anymore. One thing's for sure, it's not an overcooked lobster....

Cooking it sous vide uses a lot less butter. The lobster tails are cryovac'd individually with a knob of butter and some maldon salt. The liquid produced by that cooking method isn't much. And it's actually not used. The lobster tail is taken out of the bag, beurre monte is poured over it and flashed in the oven for the briefest time. It's then assembled together with the rest of the relevant ingredients for the appropriate dish, along with the appropriate sauce...

Until they're cooked. Seriously though it would depend on the size of the lobster. If you're poaching them in butter then you have the luxury of using a probe thermometer to tell you when they've reached 140F. The claws are left for an extra five minutes when blanched [i.e. pour boiling water over the lobsters, remove after 2 minutes, separate the claws, return them to the water for another 5 minutes].

Hopefully the following sheds a bit of light on the topic of lobsters discussed above... The lobsters at Per Se are not poached in butter the way it is explained in the French Laundry Cookbook. Instead, they are cooked sous vide, with a knob of butter and Maldon salt. Thomas Keller explains that while actual butter poaching might result in a better product, cooking it sous vide results in a comparable yet more consistent product. At home, poaching the lobster in beurre monte is a bit tricky, especially if you don't have equipment to keep the beurre monte at exactly 138F the entire time the lobster is being poached.... In the restaurant, an immersion circulator with a digital temperature control keeps the water bath at ~138F. Both methods, butter poaching and sous vide, as both are both low heat methods, allow a larger "window" or margin for error as leaving the lobsters a few minutes too long won't appreciably change the dish. After all, the cooking medium (butter or water bath) is always at 138-140 and it would be impossible to overshoot that temperature. The lobsters by the way are blanched and shelled when they arrive, cryovac'd and held in the reach in. They are only cooked sous vide when fired by the chef. They are never "held" in the water bath as there never really is any need. Remember, for the most part, the chefs know the exact sequence of dishes so they have all the time in the world to cook the dishes a la minute...

Red at the Shangri-La is pretty good. Tin Hau at the Mandarin Oriental and the Shang Palace at the Shangri-la probably serve the best upscale dimsum in those two areas. Good Earth serves awesome nouvelle chinese, located at the Fort El Cirkulo on Pasay Road serves Spanish/Philippine cuisine, the chef went to CIA. Tsukiji (for their Kobe beef) and Azuma-Ya (noodles), in the same building and owned by the same family, serves awesome Japanese food, though Tsujiki comes close to nosebleed prices for Manila standards. Unfortunately, to get great Filipino food, you have to go a bit downmarket as the upscale Philippine restaurants turned to fusion in an attempt to legitimize their cuisine. Quite sad if you ask me....

Here's a cheaper one...works perfectly: http://www.bridgekitchenware.com/moreinfo.cfm?Product_ID=718

Less than 50 bucks on ebay, do a search for raytek MT-4....

The men's loo at Felix, a very upscale bar at the Hong Kong Peninsula is rather unique. The urinals are against the exterior wall and above those urinals are windows reaching all the way to the ceiling. So basically, when relieving yourself, it seems like you're peeing into Hong Kong. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant! Especially after a long day! :)

Keller's red wine marinade has the alcohol cooked off, so alcohol tenderizing the meat has nothing to do with it. I'm pretty sure it's all about flavor....

The alcohol in the wine "cooks" the protein and gives it an unappetizing graying hue.

They are used for frying whole fish or filets. If you use a round pan that fits the fish's length, you'd have too much pan on the sides...which increases the chances of burning the fish...your pan being too big and all.

Doug Psaltis is now at the French Laundry.

It's Delouvrier-speak (looking in my reference books, I see now that it's not a standard term) for his style of lightening a sauce with whipped cream at the last minute -- it has nothing to do with breaking as in a broken sauce. He lightly whips the cream (no Profi-Whip device here -- this is done by whisk to a very soft consistency) and when the sauce is just at the moment of service he takes a spoonful of the whipped cream and "breaks" it into the sauce. The closest standard term would be fold but to fold it into the sauce would mean to distribute it evenly in several turns of the spoon. It's also not quite swirled in. It's more of a single fold-swirl motion, which Delouvrier calls breaking. ←

You can't really compare Kobe beef (of Matsusaka beef for that matter) with those Wagyu Angus crosses available here in the US. Although it is good beef, it's not quite there in the same league as real kobe beef. Having said that, the best wagyu angus beef I've had in the US is from Snake River Farms. Better than the Australian stuff from Lobel's. The French Laundry and Per Se both use Wagyu from Snake River Farms.

I believe they sharpen knives at Korin as well. A bit pricey, like $10 a knife, and you do have to set an appointment with Mr. Sugai. I take my knives there once a month, although mine are mostly Japanese western-style knives.

I just got mine....1456/5000 Can't wait to tear through it.....

Thank you. That's right! But I can't get you a table...

A little late but Per Se serves it. Tonight it was served with "Trufee Sous le Peau," Glazed Tokyo Turnips and Caramelized Mission Figs. The whole chicken is seared and cooked in a cocotte, and only the breast is served. And yes, the chicken is from Four Story Hill Farms.