There’s a new Filipino cuisine restaurant on Kalayaan Avenue in Makati, and it’s a brainchild of Chef Sau del Rosario. It’s called Sawsaw, with impeccable alliterative quality. Along with Chef Bong Sagmit, Sau has created a restaurant that aims to elevate the experience of eating Filipino, while highlighting the diversity of sauces (sawsaw) that make so many of our native dishes such enjoyable expeditions of texture and tastes. The sauces adding unexpected, but welcome, dimensions of flavors.
So these are distinctly comfort food Filipino recipes now given new tweaks and twists to make them both recognizable, and yet very unique, thanks to Chefs Sau and Bong. The interiors are crisp and clean, with alfresco dining an option, and there’s a big and wide open kitchen that has been designed with strong exhausts so that an invisible screen between the kitchen and the dining area is magically maintained.
On the evening that Issa and I dined at Sawsaw, the trio of starters we indulged in were the laing na suso, the inihaw na pulpo, and the okoy na sugpo at mais. The laing na suso is braised escargot (kuhol size) dunked in spicy coconut taro leaves and placed in an adlai shell, and I loved this as a fiery starter to the dinner.
The inihaw na pulpo was tender, char-grilled to perfection, and came with a vinegary sauce. The okoy is Sawsaw’s version of prawn and corn fritters, and was accompanied by a dollop of flavored mayonnaise-textured sauce. Both were happily shared by Issa and myself, offering a good variety of appetizers.
The soup we had was the mongo with chorizo and fried soft shell crab, and I’ll readily recommend this one, especially if you like mongo or lentil stew. Instead of the traditional "lardon" of lentil stew, Sau and Bong offer us chorizo, and add on the soft shell crab to make their silky, smooth mongo even more indulgent and unique. I’d go back for the soup alone, especially when the rainy season really gets underway.
For my main course, I had the lobster sa alavar sauce. It’s baked lobster that's served in a sauce of coconut and crab fat. And in true French-style, there’s a lot of butter involved to make the sauce on the lobster a major pleasure. From the grill section, Issa had the Kurobota pork which was served very much like how a generous chop of beef would be served. There were four sauces placed beside the generous pork cut, and the pork was super-tender and lean.
Already super full, we were trying to avoid dessert, but Sau insisted we have just one scoop of their homemade ice cream, and we were in for a true surprise. It’s their champorado with tuyo ice cream, and it’s an extra smooth scoop of dark chocolate with the tuyo giving a crunch element to each spoonful of gelato. Wonderful!
There were so many other menu items that we eyed (the sea bass is calling me!), and hope to discover in subsequent visits. Based on our first experience of Sawsaw, it’s a real winner and offers cuisine very different from Sau’s nearby Cafe Fleur. If this is Chef Sau’s second or third coming, bring it on, as he’s still wielding a lot of kitchen juju and magic, and I’m ready to be a willing victim!