'Masarap'
MEDIUM RARE
Lechon. Queso de bola. Chinese ham.
The three kings of the Christmas feast. A taste of the crosscultural nature of our cuisine.
And yet, why is Filipino food not as widely, internationally popular as we think it should be? Sinigang and adobo are wellknown, the way the Japanese have their sushi and the Vietnamese have their pho, but our dinuguan and binagoongan are another story.
Neither a gourmet nor foodie am I, but I could guess that some of our favorite dishes are simply too exotic to foreigners in terms of appearance, smell, and taste. In a certain borough in New York, for example, the smell of bagoong and garlic coming out of the kitchen was for a long time a no-no in apartments housing people of different nationalities.
Not long ago a Manila-based Filipino chef offered the suggestion that instead of pushing strongly flavored dishes, we should promote chicken “inasal”; it’s gentler to the senses — nose, eyes, and tongue — and it’s “masarap,” a word we should teach the world. So why not inasal?
Before somebody finds a non-Filipino name for it, we should make inasal a trademark, ours.
As for promoting Filipino food outside the Philippines, there’s lots of work to be done. Taking Thailand as an example. When a Thailander wants to open a restaurant in Manila, his government, through his embassy here, will lend him or her a hand from start to finish, from setting up to sourcing the ingredients, from bringing in the chefs and hiring the crew (local) to designing the menu. As for taxes? Like it or not, food diplomacy is a given in today’s world.
Years ago when I was in Budapest, Hungary, we went to a mall for lunch. After tasting the paprika-flavored dishes in a restaurant serving “Asian food,” lo and behold, my friends and I beheld sticks of chicken barbecue looking exactly like our Manila BBQ. (At this restaurant, we met the Philippine ambassador to Austria. She, too, found the “Asian” barbecue a heaven-sent.)
PS: Good to know that our Department of Tourism has been reaching out, advertising the wondrous, original flavors of our 7,000 islands to the world (burp!).