Without a Map, On the Town And Hungry
 
"….I found a restaurant – Philippine, in this case --- whose menu touted an organic varietal of cooking that I’d never eaten before.  I say “organic” because I wish to exclude the whole “fusion” idea.  You know the sort of thing: Latin-infused Japanese food or Pan-Asian/New American  -- deliberate exotica, as it were, dreamed up by metropolitan chefs to kick some life into our jaded palates.
 
Philippine food is organic because it exists in the Philippines, not merely in the imagination of a particular chef or breed of chefs.  Real people cook it and eat it and call it their own.  Yet neither I nor my wife had ever encountered it.  So, as with all losses of virginity, we addressed the situation with a mixture of misgiving and elation:  Should we?  Shouldn’t we?  Of course we should!  But what if we don’t like it?  Well, we won’t do it again!
 
And so it was that I came to enter the portals of Cendrillon (the restaurant in question) and to discover a tangy, hearty cuisine that is a marriage of Spain and the Orient, or, an old Philippine hand described it to me later, “like Asian food cooked by Puerto Ricans.”  Fusion, yes, but one arranged by history…."


The Wall Street Journal, The Weekend Journal
Friday, September 24, 2004
De Gustibus
By Tunku Vandarajan