Chefs Alfred Santiago & Aaron Isip in rare collab at Waterside
If you’re looking for an exciting new dining adventure, there’s no need to look any further than what our talented chefs can do with our very own Filipino food. The upcoming Four Hands Dinner at Solaire’s Waterside restaurant on Nov. 24 is a good case in point.
While our appetites will always be ready for Pinoy dishes that are traditionally prepared, Filipino cuisine has most certainly evolved in the hands of gifted Filipino chefs like Waterside’s Alfred Santiago and Kasa Palma’s Aaron Isip. The former is a Michelin-trained chef while the latter trained in France, and now runs a much-loved restaurant on Palma Street in Poblacion, Makati.
These two seasoned chefs focus mainly on the use of the grill to coax the most flavor out of a range of local ingredients, prepared in ingenious ways. The sophisticated Waterside restaurant, located at Solaire Resort Entertainment City, is a perfect setting for an elevated Filipino meal. The sparkling Christmas trees add to the festive mood as we inch ever closer to the holidays.
We were able to try the dishes chefs Alfred and Aaron are preparing for the exclusive dinner on the 24th—from beginning to end, everything was amazing.
This four-hands collab began with a platter of raw seafood that included oysters with a green mango relish and warm bone marrow, prawns in red bell pepper sauce, scallops with kamias and razor clams with lambanog calamansi jelly. Note that these fat pieces of the freshest shellfish sat inside a bowl of edible crushed ice that tasted like a seafood sinigang. The edible ice does not refer to the regular ice cubes underneath the serving bowl!
The next starter came on banana leaves on a wooden tray and, at first glance, looked like kakanin. That’s because the base was tupig, which is made from glutinous rice and coconut milk. No doubt the chefs chose this because it is cooked by grilling, which imparts a smoky taste. The chefs topped this with mascarpone flavored with tinapa, smoked fish, and a generous helping of smoked caviar, which had us scraping our banana leaves to get every little bit!
Continuing on with this smoky theme, tender octopus grilled on a skewer followed, enhanced by yogurt that had also been smoked. Next to it were crab shells filled with pinangat that was made with smoked gata. Definitely, seafood and smoke are a delicious match.
In this generous menu, the scrumptious starters were followed by four mains. The first was red snapper topped with its own scales that had been cooked until they were crisp. There was the most tender of beef short ribs, cooked confit-style, which means in its own fat, for a good 36 hours.
Veggies weren’t neglected as a platter of grilled corn, sweet potato and kale arrived at the table. Who can resist grilled corn-on-the-cob?
We were next served the largest mantis shrimp I’d ever seen. These are the carnivorous crustaceans that can punch their prey with their “clubs.” The mantis were split open and topped with a buro and mustasa cream that delivered a punch of flavor.
Then, the huge red lobsters we had been eyeing on a side table followed. They had looked like miniature lechons and that was, in fact, the way they were prepared. Served sliced, like roast lechon belly, they came with sticky rice and a trio of sauces.
Did I mention that you should arrive for this dinner with a big appetite? This is because there are still two desserts to follow. The first is centered on corn, with a corn madeleine, sweet corn ice cream, and corn puffs. The pretty Waterside bombes feature torched meringue and espasol crumble. And last but not the least, a little woven box of truffles makes a sweet takeaway.
Hands down, this four-hands dinner had some of the most innovative and delicious Filipino food I’d ever had. I would have been more than happy to book for Nov. 24 and have this entire meal all over again, if not for my being out of town that weekend.