CHEF GENE GONZALEZ WITH FIREPLACE’S CHEF CRAMER AND STAFF

Because most rotisseries bank on the quality of meat, and the chef’s (rotisseur) good culinary command on his dishes, a steakhouse must always serve its cuisine with a good sense of urgency. The meat for steaks—besides a good marinade, and proper crusting of the meat’s internal juice and flavors—should always sit at room temperature, 1 hour before grilling (set up inside a fridge chiller in tropical climate as an equivalent) to ensure good heat effect inside the meat. This is when most popularized restaurants falter.

Most pseudo-haute cuisine cafés that serve steaks—like that overrated restaurant along Quirino Ave. Manila—with very expensive pricing, miss out to prepare their meats an hour before cooking, as they ensure the quality of the meat in high-freeze especially when clients are in low count, because only the rich people can afford its cuisine.

One has to think that steakcraft is a cuisine for all, and it should always be served for the purpose of a man’s good sustenance and gustatory cheer, that by professionalism includes the value of not burning your customer’s pocket, most so if your steaks are just magnificently dressed-up coaly meat-lumps, demiglace and crap.

The urgency of knowing what sealer or crusting to use will enhance the beef’s taste profile, for the flavors to complement other dishes of the entire multi-course if served in a degustation. Spices and flavorings should complement, if not a vin-line from white to dessert wines, a single vin de table, so to create oneness with the dishes.

A standard Digion will always work its propensities for a wide variety of reds if meat-staples as sirloins, tenderloins, rib eye, and prime ribs are to be served, and waiting to be tempered by rosemary. A Digion’s sonic kick will always counter a highly acidic vin-blanc, but will jolt good if served with white meat of fowl or fish (of course as a basic gourmet rule.) Pommery brands and mild English mustards work well with thyme and sage, especially when the beef is abundant with fat fires of

STEAK MD RUB KO TO

smoky bouquets. When, fat marbling is at minimal—and when lactic acid is abundant within the strands, decipherable only by a chef’s sharp palate when the meat is already served as a dish (based on the proper way of killing the cattle before filleting)—a combination marbling of mustard with rosemary, salt and pepper will always work especially when the steak is seared on a pan over high-heat. Of course, salt and pepper, with light thyme or sage will work almost all the time, most particularly if charbroiled.

This is where Fireplace of Hyatt Manila, enters with high heat. An order of Black Angus Rib Eye—of thick rib eye fillet with minimal fat graphs, in light mustard marbling, salt, pepper, and rosemary—joyously gambols a perfect marriage with a faintly chilled Nobilio Pinot Noir 2003 of Marlborough VY, New Zealand.

Operational under Chef Hubertus Cramer (German Patissier,) this restaurant boasts a Germanic pedagogy on the art of roasts, with a fused metal grill with quality searing slab as a highlight technology. A Rack of Lamb order in this hub, primes a piquant of tenderness and dainty culinary redolence, well enough for a female’s abhorrence to lamb victuals, especially when tainted with Medi

terranean culinary touch.

Fireplace’s Australian Castricum Rack of Lamb—as a personal preference and highly recommended better than the Black Angus Rib Eye—is a serendipitous convening of natural flavors, light spices, and the executive sous chef’s gastronomic faculties—more so, with a talked glass of Riddoch Coonawarra Shiraz 2002, and a female’s plinking utensil’s by every rub on a hot earthenware.

The Fireplace, an upscale steakhouse offering prime meats and seafood, showcases a culinary and interactive dining experience unique to Hyatt. The Fireplace specializes in steaks and wine. And quite impressive is a selection of over 800 premium quality vintage and New World wines.

An encounter with their cuisine begins with a fine selection of mouth-watering appetizers; some of the choices are Prawn Cocktail; Freshly Chucked Kalibo Oysters; Gratinated Oyster with Parma Ham; Pan Fried Goose Liver with Caramelized Apple Salad; and Australian Black Angus Beef Tartar with Gherkins, Capers and Quail Eggs.

The main course of prime meats and seafood are served with innovative presentations. The menu includes Australian Black Angus, Harvey, and Cargill Beef; and a number of pork, lamb and poultry entrees. For seafood, there are choices of fresh fish and shellfish. The spread includes Blue Marlin Fillet with Thyme and Cracked Pepper; Whole Roasted Mangrove Barramundi with Caramelized Lemon and Tomatoes; Sea Caught Flower Prawns in Garlic and Parsley, and rare Live Whole Rock Lobster. The restaurant’s selection of specialty sauces, include Mushroom and Garlic Cream, Green Peppercorn, Béarnaise, Red Wine and Shallot, Lemon Beurre Blanc, Mustard and Beurre Café de Paris. A perfect combination with the entrée is a creative mix of side dishes like Grilled Green Asparagus, Char-grilled Bell Peppers, Braised Portabello Mushrooms, and Home made fried Potatoes.

Following this spread, guests can try Pastry Chef Victor Hasting’s line of desserts including Rhubarb Crème Brulee; Cocoa Sherbet; Baked Cheese Cake; Pineapple Ragout; Malibu Ice Cream and Black Cherry Clafoutis together with Vanilla Bean Sauce among others. There’s also a selection of home-made ice cream and sherbet, like Walnut Brittle, Malibu, Ivory Chocolate, Cocoa Sherbet and Raspberry Sherbet.

The Fireplace has an open-plan kitchen, which allows chefs to take center stage while guests enjoy the buzz of seeing the kitchen brigade in action. The main feature of the grill room is a 10-foot copper covered wood fired oven in full view of the guests. This customized oven’s unique steaming action gives the ingredients a texture and taste that can never be duplicated by commercial ovens.

Clearly—without any debasement on the steak-fad interjected by other hotel rotisseries like Manila Pavillion’s, and Mandarin Oriental and the roasting paradox of everything in between—Hyatt’s Fireplace is a wakeupper to all hotel F&B that grilling is here to stay, once more.

In its orchestral gastronomic grandeur, steak has been in the Philippines for some time now. Steak is good, simply because its good.

Our affinity for "man’s meat" goes as far as our ancestor’s good culinary counterpoints to make each Sunday a feast—from lamb, Moooh en Aspic, a late-American veal steak, Venison dishes that crossed the Atlantic and perfect with a douse of Vatel’s Sauce to tame its mild brine, Peter Luger’s Porterhouse and T-bone special, Brilliat Savarin’s Fillet d’ Beouf, up to that Chain des Rotisseurs’ member café’s "hanger steak with potato puree, port demiglace, and veggies" along P. Guevarra—but, a porterhouse in honest medium-well doneness will, by all means, guide one who cannot decide.

This is when a quaint steak house, badged as the "STEAK DOCTOR," checks in. Beyond words on all the Filipino’s effort to embody our love for steaks—from Sullipan, to McArthur, up to "the long forgotten steak dishes of Maximo Jimenes, served at the first Max’s branch some time ago," up to the Pinoy US Black Angus Boom—Steak MD of Quezon City is the best, most affordable, cleanest, and fundamentally satisfying Batangas Beef Steak House for all to enjoy.

This hub specializes in a variety of steak rubs. Monibel Dychiao, owner of Steak MD, ensures that everyone will find a flavor to his or her liking, be it sweet or spicy. Notable dishes in their menu include the "Rub Ko To," this porterhouse steak, in a marinade of different herbs and spices, is Steak MD’s house specialty. The Atomic Rub, hot and spicy. The Ang Cha Rub is a mix of sweetness and spice.

Also, the resto’s Chicken/Spare Rib Barbecue, soaked in a house marinade, exudes the flavors of prime sweetness and peppery twangs inside the mouth.

Other dishes in their line include the Daing na Bangus, Burger Steak, and Liempo.

Situated by the creek along Tomas Morato (near the Petron Station,) Steak MD is, perhaps, the best steakhouse that offers the most affordable steaks in Quezon City, due to high sanitation and taste standards.

Since a single steak dish reflects a degustateur’s culinary skills—by way of simplicity and panache, when a concoction locks with appetizers, wines, and desserts—a sampler is bound to explore the most upfront, and honest exquisiteness of good meat. Yet, Wines, starching, and pastries simply run second hand to a good entrée, and above all—fine service. "The Pleasures of the Table," does not end on the table alone. One has to remember, that all of the world’s greatest dishes, revolve around the concept of good service and good appetite.

Perhaps, if one is in search of both, Old Manila Restaurant of Peninsula Manila, Makati City must not be in the waiting.

Here—where "excellent" service sculpts good cuisine—an order of Crusted Loin of Lamb—P1450 of grilled loin of lamb with braised artichokes, red onion confit, and rosemary—is a fairly good dish with supreme lamb flavors, equivocally unfitted for a glass of French Shiraz, but actually heaven to a Romanian Cabernet Sauvignon. Served with a different spunk—inimical to most lamb roasts that are either served minimal to PRESS people like how other hotels do, and sliced between bone-cracks—this lamb dish is a generous serving of lamb with smoky after notes of rosemary and Moroccan spices, that at some point can keep up to a French Chardonnay, especially when served with a salty crusting, and highlighted by a jacket of mint jelly.

The chef’s Pan-Seared Foie Gras (P920 of fine foie gras with apple, celery in port-wine reduction, with shallots confit,) Herbed Tuna Tartar and Prawn Croustillant (P640 with creamed guacamole, and sweet pepper coulis,) and Lobster ravioli (P890 with morel asparagus fricasse and candied lemon skins,) are minuetos for the palate—a gastronomic concerto trio, waiting for a good bang with a perfectly chilled chardonnay, for a sampler to know when to clap.

However, Old Manila’s US Black Angus Rib Eye—of rib eye in purist crusting of salt and pepper, with pepper sauce, a perfectly German mashed potato, and with buttered vegetables—is the chorus of all rib eyes within Makati grounds, that when sampled with a minute sip of Cabernet Sauvignon exudes the finest of Ayala Rotisseries and the cadenza’s of LVBeethoven’s pre-choral strings fireworks of the "Joyful Joyful". Indeed, this rib eye steak is no less than a 9th symphony, and with the beef’s well preserved flavors—tamed by the pepper crackles inside the palate—is a massive combination of vox in heavenly prallers.

Under the gustatory baton of Tobias Gensheimer (Chef de Cuisine, German,) and the most excellent F&B Manager in the Philippine hotel scene (based on this writer’s coverage on hotel culinary service for almost two years,) Christian Westbeld, Old Manila is, indeed, the best hotel grill house in Makati City.

With the orchestral beat of our current cuisine, the steak returns to our tables as a great durante. In the branded, but relatively constant, and evocative stay of steaks—rib eyes, sirloin, T-bones, the porterhouse, and prime ribs—in all its coruscating well-doneness as a current superstar entrée of menus, Manila cuisine matures… meaning, we’re back to the basics.