Chef Margarita Fores, Asia’s Best
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Margarita Fores
What Forés does is magic, even if it’s magic that needs little deciphering. She’s as open about her cooking as her personality; a vivacious woman who is fondly called Gaita. She’s not a diva, but she has come to terms about being a barrier-breaker in the restaurant business, doing her own thing in what used to be a niche in Philippine cuisine, quietly forging a sustainable path in a country low on food security.
It took time for her to figure out why Filipino food was trailing behind in Southeast Asia in terms of international ubiquity. Japan was leading out there, followed by South Korea, which is now the darling of the New York restaurant scene. Thailand had stepped into global recognition, as well as Vietnam. It was challenging to present the best of the Philippines’ dishes – until, adobo became some kind of phenomenon, and Filipino-American chefs were creating their own signatures with a play on ingredients.
It’s getting there, the taste of “really loving our own,” she said. “We grew up with a colonial mentality, always thinking that what’s imported is better. I think we only enjoyed good Filipino food at home. We had to fall in love with our own all over again.”
There were Filipino women chefs who came before her; dames like Glenda Barretto and the late Nora Daza, who had opened a restaurant in Paris called Aux Îles Philippines but had closed it after a while. Forés became an icon of Filipino cuisine in the reverse order, introducing foreign cuisine first in Manila before refining her kitchen art by rediscovering the food of her birthplace. Her Italian restaurant, Cibo, which opened in 1997, was the product of her what-do-I-want-to-do-in-my-life sojourn in – where else? – Italy.
Cibo
Learning to love Italian food began in New York in the 1970s when the entire Araneta family – her mother’s side of the sugar plantation clan--had decided they were safer there when the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos was ruling the country. The Italian trend had descended on the Big Apple. The family moved back to Manila, in their famous ‘white house’ in the Cubao district of Quezon City, a year before Marcos was ousted in 1986.
“The evolution of my work became a confluence between the start of discovery of Italian cuisine and then rediscovering Filipino cuisine because of that process,” she said. In other words, she had to go out before she could see what was at home, and that the passion for authenticity could also be found at home, a spiritual growth in a culinary sense. “I ended up falling in love with my own precisely because of the learning that had to do with respect for ingredients.”
By now she’s an expert on taste buds. She knows how to make a foreigner delight in adobo by changing the vinegar from the local of coconut origin to a balsamic one. She could use the ripest and sweetest chico in lieu of fichi (that are not grown in the Philippines), to go with prosciutto. Once in a restaurant in Florence, she was served a salad of palm hearts, raw mushrooms, parmigiana, olive oil, lemon, and sea salt – only to be told that the palm hearts were canned from South America. It dawned on her that we have the best banana hearts.
Her Cibo was a hit among the Manila foodies. I was a rabid fan of all the pasta dishes as if they were my baby food. I would choose pasta over rice since then. I could survive on spaghetti with sundried tomatoes over any cup of instant noodles. Almost three decades later, Cibo has become a chain. And it was also because of Cibo that Forés went native, sort of.
The squash soup that she served on her menu was a best-seller, owing to the fresh farm-produced kalabasa that she shipped in all the way from Negros. It somewhat dented her profit margin, but it was the beginning of sourcing local products. “Modesty aside, I think that making that extra effort twenty-seven years ago, of being authentic, is mission accomplished.”
In 2013, she opened her strictly organic restaurant at the high-end Rockwell Center, called Grace Park (which now has a second branch at the Gateway Mall in Cubao), using seasonal harvests. It opened her link to the “whole movement of working directly with farmers and at the same time promoting, really teaching people from the grassroots, how to plant their own.”
Grace Park’s Lamb Adobo
It led to a trend of going local, she said. Where before restaurant cooks would be guarded and selfish about their sources of ingredients, today they share information among themselves and tie up with what she called “consolidators” with direct access to farmers. This allows a certain business continuity that avoids having their earnings squeezed by unscrupulous middlemen. The fact that agriculture remains backward in the country made going back to basics, paradoxically, a beneficial end-game.
This “new thing that’s happening,” she said, “is also heartwarming to know that we did not become industrialized as much when it comes to agriculture. Since we’re so behind, we’re actually quite a way ahead when people all over the world are trying to work backwards.”
Forés has had her own personal setbacks, having suffered from cancer twice; thyroid first in 2006 and breast in 2013. She has recovered from both, after undergoing treatments in Singapore, and yes, doing the basics of juicing and sticking to plant-based meals for a duration. In between these upheavals, she didn’t fail to focus on the food that mattered. She wanted to see Manila become the epicenter of food festivals, and she helped make it a success with Madrid Fusión Alimentos de España.
The floodlights shone on Filipino cuisine in the consecutive years that Madrid Fusion was held in Manila, from 2015 to 2017, on the behest of the agriculture and tourism departments whose heads she had personally approached for the grand idea. Forés had wanted the Philippines to be the featured country; her wish flourished into something bigger: “Why don’t we make it in Manila,” she was told, a country colonized by Spain for more than three hundred years?
“Her Cibo was a hit among the Manila foodies. I was a rabid fan of all the pasta dishes as if they were my baby food.”
The best chefs from Asia and Europe joined the congress of culinary demonstrations, with days of dinners, street parties, and a festival. It was the first and only time the Spanish organizers held it in a foreign country, in Asia at that. The event heralded an unprecedented attraction to Philippine cuisine, which had been somewhat ignored in the region.
Forés felt those three years were “a turning point.” At last, Filipino chefs were creating a buzz in the world of restaurants. There could have been two more years to follow, but the five-year contract was cut short, no thanks to the change in national politics at the onset of 2016. The scene went larger elsewhere, in America specifically, with budding Filipino American chefs creating their culinary waves.
The hour of the interview was up, a brief albeit a close-up interaction with one of the country’s modern Filipino women who have made it to the world stage. We were seated in her Lusso champagne bar in the heart of the financial district’s Greenbelt Malls in Makati, a short walk from the Ayala Museum whose café Forés’ company also serves.
Lusso Balmori
She had envisioned this milieu from when she was traveling with her mother, Lourdes Araneta, who passed away early last year, a woman she adored, a fashion icon to many. (In fact, before fulfilling her dream of being a chef, Forés used to work for the Valentino fashion house in New York). In remembering her mother, she was a little girl awed by the hotel lobbies in Hong Kong, Paris, Milan, and Venice.
Lusso is meant to evoke that feeling in society circles, luxurious but not decadent, adventurous but not too bohemian, said Forés, who is now 65. She’s always dressed in black, a single mother to a thirty-something son whom she is proud to see starting his own restaurant business. She has never married, but her love life, I am told, was colorful enough.
I could have had a glass of champagne if I had chosen to linger. I chose fresh dalandan (native orange) juice instead for the limited time, and to give me enough energy to brave the afternoon ride home in Manila’s horrific traffic. When she took her leave, I imagined that if Truman Capote were still alive, this would be the kind of place he’d be hanging out in Manila. He’d be sipping some wine in Lusso and savoring the taste of Margarita Forés’ pastelitos de manga (mango cupcakes).
Criselda Yabes is a writer and journalist who has written about a dozen books, some of them on the military and Mindanao. She now lives in northeast France and comes home to the Philippines when life calls for it.
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