MEDIUM RARE

With Olive and Niwa Ang in their car, I was able to visit again Baliwag, Bulacan, home of our friend Manny Samson, interior designer who has clients, including grand hotels, on both sides of the globe.

And just as I remembered, Manny’s famous white house occupies an entire block on his street inside Waterford Subdivision, surrounded as it has always been by Palawan cherry trees, a natural screen from the heat and light of the sun. (What I keep forgetting to ask is whether those trees get to bloom, once a year, like Japan’s trademark sakura trees.)

Technically, Manny lives alone but the white house is big enough for his nine nephews and nieces, anytime they visit or decide to stay the night. Like the professional and true homebody that he is, Manny makes sure that every six months the house gets a makeup or once-over, to check out and get rid of cracks and gaps and leaks, if any.

White is the color everywhere in the house and outside, including the roof and garage, and as the visitor will soon discover, the washrooms, too, except the toilet paper. On the day of our visit, the color of the day for the bathrooms was chartreuse, a bright, stinging chartreuse. Upon interrogation, Manny admitted that there are two other colors waiting to be put to use: orange and black. Orange sounds okay, but black? “I have a supplier,” he said with an impish smile, as if the name should be kept like a state secret.

It was no secret that to accommodate our group of eight, Manny needed a professional chef to prepare our lunch and its natural consequence, merienda. For this he hired Baliwag’s caterer, a Dutchman, Paul Stoks, and his Filipina wife, Keith. As it happens, Mr. and Mrs. Stoks own and manage Bulacan’s one and only Dutch-Filipino pastry café, Krema Via (0918-5333-709). They have a three-year-old boy.

What does a Dutch-Filipino meal taste like?  It would be easier to describe what it looked like — a festival of a buffet East and West —soup, pasta, fried rice, a mountain of desserts, prompting one guest to exclaim, “Nine kinds!”

While waiting for a burp to issue, I very shyly asked for a cup of tea.