Course 1: Abre Gana - Tatung opens with a trio of little bites. There’s a torched carabao kesong puti from Laguna, a whipped aligue butter, and a generous portion of ampalaya salad with a slice of crisp etag (Sagada-cured pork). It’s a course designed to wake up your taste buds—creamy and salty with the kesong puti, briny and buttery with the tomalley, and tangy and earthy with the salad. If you’re quite famished from your journey, enjoy this course with bread and the refreshing santol tonic that's served as awelcome drink. PS. The portions in each course are generous, so we recommend that you take it easy with the bread! Jeeves De Veyra
Course 2: Tamales - I am not a fan of tamales. I’ve never liked them – it’s either I find them lacking in flavor or too heavy and overbearing. This course, though, inspired by the tamales of Tacloban, is that perfect little tamale dish for people like me. It tasted like a tamale, but elevated and balanced with the adobo pula-inspired sauce and a grilled corn salad. The former giving a nice acidic savory counterpoint to the innate heaviness of the tamale and the latter amping up its inherent nutty flavor and introducing sweet and refreshing components and different textures. If you’re getting the wine pairing, this course is especially good with the Cava which will round off the bite with a bit of dryness and needed lightness.
Course 3: Lumpiang Freska - One thing about Tatung’s food is that when you see it, you'll know what the dish is. It will be familiar, but also different, which is the best description for this course. It’s just like a fresh lumpia with a base filling of heart of palm. The wrapper is black as sin thanks to squid ink, the filling is more seafood than heart of palm, and the sauce is Cebu-style with a white creamy garlic sauce punctuated with cilantro oil. After the strong flavors of the previous course, this one was more subtle.
Course 4: Patir - From Mindanao, Patir or Pastil is usually a banana-wrapped parcel of rice and stewed meat. In Tatung’s course, he reinterprets the dish into a betel leaf wrap to be eaten samgyup-style with a filling of crispy duck floss cooked with Maranao palapa, fresh pomelo, green mango, and peanuts. Taking a bite of the wrap, it’s the peanut sauce –nutty and unctuous—that melds all the flavors of this complex but simply delicious dish. This was a standout course thanks as much to its progressive medley of textures as to its flavors and will surely be one of his signature dishes. Jeeves De Veyra
Course 5: Inasal at Saksak Sinagol - This was one of the simpler dishes on the menu. It's essentially a sweet adobo with rice, except the adobo component being slices of honey-glazed slow-roasted pork with pork jus, and the rice component being a saksak-sinagol (which translates in Cebuano as a hodgepodge) of mixed starchy crops—rice, camote, and saging na saba. It wasn’t the meat that was the star of the dish but rather the ‘rice’ – gloriously finished with a spoonful of pork oil, sea salt, and crispy garlic.
Course 6: Ginataang Isda - We travel forward on Tatung’s flavor train with this interpretation of Ginataang Isda. Inspired by his grandmother’s recipe, this dish isn’t as obvious as it reads. Labahita or surgeon fish is pan-fried and draped with a sauce made of tomatoes, ginger, aromatics, and coconut cream, served with roasted squash. Quite a new combination to my palate, it was more like a sarciado (sans the egg) than a ginataang isda, although one is reminded by the ‘gata’ aspect and by the coconut foam on the plate. For those who opt for the wine pairing, all the dishes prior to this course worked very well with both their red and white wine options, but I much preferred the white.
Course 7: Sorbetes - The palate cleanser is a refreshing watermelon-calamansi sorbet. Jeeves De Veyra
Course 8: Sarciado - Sarciado means cooked with a thick sauce, which fits this course to a T. The ‘main course’ is a serving of a four-hour beef shortrib ala mechada served alongside a creamy adlai risotto, grilled mushrooms, and a dollop of pickled green mango and onion jelly. It’s rich upon rich flavors are tempered and transformed by the brilliant addition of the sweet-sour umami-rich jelly. Of course, best enjoyed with red wine.
Course 9: Panghimagas Primera - Using familiar flavors but combined in new forms, this first course was my favorite between the two desserts in the menu. Reminiscent of the ‘3-cheese bibingka’ in Agos, the pichi-pichi cassava ‘cake’ enveloped by a torched yema custard and topped with grated queso de bola tasted like Christmas. I’ve never had torched yema before and it gives the yema a smokey, almost salted egg flavor. Jeeves De Veyra
Course 10: Panghimagas Segunda - Tatung fittingly ends our ‘encounter’ with a course that celebrates his hometown. This dessert is a mélange of well-known Cebuano sweet flavors: decadent tablea cake using tablea from Argao, Cebu; a crispy cashew bar; dried mango pieces; polvoron powder; a mango sauce, and a thick tablea sauce. Quite poetic to end where it all started for him, his hometown.
Chef Tatung in the KitchenJeeves De Veyra
