Homecoming: How a restaurant defines the word

By Joseph L. Garcia
Reporter

WHAT DOES the word “home” mean? In a world of constant movement, it could mean many things: something as simple as having somewhere to lay your feet on after a long day, or else a place where you can belong, either out of guilt or by love. A new restaurant by chef Myke “Tatung” Sarthou gives a diner a taste of what another person thinks is home, and in the process, perhaps finding the meaning for themselves too.

Mr. Sarthou has been active in the culinary scene for almost 10 years, opening his namesake restaurant in Quezon City in 2011. Now closed, it stood around two blocks away from his new restaurant, Talisay (named after his Cebu hometown), which opened around a month ago. The journey to go back home has been long: in the space between, he has opened multiple restaurants (now since closed, with him saying that it was due to conflicts with his previous partners), spoke at Madrid Fusion Manila in 2016, and represented the country at Madrid Fusion in Spain in 2017. He has also appeared almost daily on morning TV for a cooking segment, came out with a documentary about salt in the Philippines, and for a time, his face appeared on a line of sauces. He has three cookbooks to his name, to wit: Philippine Cookery: From Heart to Platter (which won first prize at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in 2017), Rice to the Occasion, and Dish Karte sa Kusina. He’s quite a busy man, but he said, “I was coasting, doing books and all that.”

Talisay now serves as one of two restaurants under his belt at present (he has another venture in La Union).

The venture is part of his welcoming his brother back to the Philippines after a 30-year stay in Germany. They found an old house and decorated it in a span of three months. Speaking about his partnership with his brother, Mr. Sarthou said, “We had to find a point of convergence, something that both of us relate to, so we chose Talisay, where we grew up; the dinners, the food we had, and all that.”

So Mr. Tatung answered how he built the restaurant, but he had not yet answered why. Despite being burnt out and exhausted from the restaurant game, he said, “You always go back to your core. Nami-miss ng kaluluwa mo (your soul misses it). It’s where I’m most happy.” So there, dear reader, maybe he has answered what home might mean, though really, he was talking about work. “It’s being able to serve food with integrity again.”

LUNCH AT TALISAY
Mr. Sarthou sat down to lunch with ����ý earlier this week, serving first a goat cheese salad. Its freshness was unparalleled, and somehow reminded one of Rapunzel’s mother, pilfering vegetables from a neighbor’s garden. With every bite of fresh greens, homemade Caesar dressing, and crunchy buttered croutons (we were going to pass on this one, but after a bite, we realized it wasn’t of the supermarket variety), we were this close to trading in a firstborn to whichever witch prepared this. Next came a Pancit Molo (soft wantons in soup), with a chicken bone broth prepared for hours. The broth almost made the spoon bend with its weight, its rich nuanced taste reflecting the time it took to make it.

Next came the Paella Mixta, a silky mélange of heirloom Benguet rice, chicken, chorizos, and seafood. In Spain, apparently, a good paella is a praise to the rice in it, not the seafood or everything else on top or mixed into it. My notes, laced with multiple swear words extolling its taste, was centered on the rice, as it should be: silky with a bit of bite at the end, while proud seafood, good by themselves, stand by as backup singers. Now that’s skill, to make a simple staple sing. This paired with his adobo, which looks nothing like you would expect it to be: crisp, almost like a chicharron. It’s been cooked multiple times: stewed, baked, then deep-fried to achieve that texture (it goes back the adobo of his childhood, which was dried). In my notes again, a line of curses precedes my praise: it’s noisy, it gives what one thinks is a boring dish life. Furthermore, beyond its crispy exterior, the flavor of adobo remains intact.

As we’ve mentioned, Mr. Sarthou has since trimmed his deals, working on basically two restaurants, and then prepared for a cookbook launch last year. In slowing and scaling down, he says, “I don’t have as much energy as I used to before.” He also looks back on the last 10 or so years: the tours, the restaurants, the licensing deals. “I have very few memories of it. Sunod-sunod eh (they came one right after the other). I didn’t have time to sit down, to enjoy that,” he said in a mixture of Tagalog and English. “Half of it was a blur.”

Talisay then, begins to truly feel like home. “It’s good that I can sit down, I can have a bit more time with friends… watch TV,” he said. “I’m still busy now, but I’m out of the rat race.”

Finally, ����ý asked Mr. Sarthou what home really means for him: “Home is where you decide to make a home,” he said. “At a certain age, when you’re in control of your life, you determine how you put things (in it). It’s not an accident. Having a home is not dependent with other people. It’s really a conscious choice of building a home… wherever you are. There’s no stopping you.”

“It feels like home, because we made it a home.”