MANILA, Philippines?Italian food was the menu done by two different chefs on three occasions in two separate venues. One is Italian, the new chef at the Paparazzi of Edsa Shangri-La Hotel in Ortigas. The other is a Filipino chef who chose to open an Italian restaurant in Bacolod.

The Filipino chef is Jomi Gaston. He looked different from the last time we saw him. He seemed taller, was certainly more muscular and darker, no doubt because of his daily swimming routine which has built up and toned his body. And he looked different because his clothes were the much more relaxed shorts and loose shirt rather than the corporate chef?s white uniform we all remembered him wearing.

Jomi went the route of many young chefs who worked in the kitchens of restaurants that inspired them to take up cooking. He did just that after graduating from high school in New York, proceeding to the prestigious Culinary Institute of America (CIA). When he came home he didn?t cook at a restaurant or a hotel but applied for and got the job in the corporate food company of Unilever, Caterplan.

It is that time when we knew him, the thin man in his whites, quite shy and hardly flashy as many of his colleagues were who strutted around in their uniforms but who hadn?t really proven themselves as chefs. He quietly did his job and absorbed the experiences of different chefs and restaurant owners here and abroad. He knew he would apply those lessons learned when he opened his own outlets.

In an interview for the book ?Cooking with Filipino Chefs? (CCA & Anvil Publishing, 2000), Jomi told me that in the future he wanted to ?open his own place in Bacolod where the Gastons are from.? He has done that, only there are two places?Café Uma and Trattoria Uma.

Uma means farm in Ilonggo and Jomi relates that when someone asks him where he is, he has to be clear as to which uma he is referring to, the restaurant or the farm in Manapla, Hacienda Rosalia, where the ancestral home of the Gastons is located.

The Café was the first to be set up in one corner of the Association of Negros Producers display area. He served pasta dishes, salads, coffee and sweets. Today, it?s in another building at Lacson and 15th Streets. Of interest is the one wall recalling Bacolod?s past through magazine pages?pictures of Ilongga ladies with their high-coiffed hair, made up in the fashion of that generation, and wearing stilettos.

Then his Italian restaurant outlet came next in the same building but just a corner away from the Café. No, the two outlets don?t share a kitchen, he said. Which is why the onion soup, a recipe of his uncle, Monsignor Guillermo Gaston, had to be brought by a waiter from the Café to our table at the Trattoria.

We ate so many dishes that evening, tasting a variety from aperitivo to dolci. I liked his risotto with mushrooms, crabcakes and pizza Bianca. We drank Proseco all the way and then ended our dinner with tiramisu and some gelato. All the while we were regaled by Jomi of his experiences abroad, those funny incidents that made the drudgery of work bearable and which provided him now with anecdotes with which to entertain his friends, complete with one of Jomi?s talents we never knew he had?mimicry.

Young Italian chef

The Italian chef is Massimo Pettinau, also young and displays the energy that people his age are supposed to have. For our first meeting, the buffet at Paparazzi was not sufficient to show us what he thought we should know about his cooking. And so he brought out something of his hometown in Sardinia, a traditional ravioli dish called culurgiones. He demonstrated how a bit of rounded pasta can be braided at the two edges. While he didn?t cook it with the favored stuffing of potatoes, mint and pecorino cheese, he did bring out two other pastas?a tortelli of eggplant and cheese and a pumpkin ravioli. The latter had a tinge of sweetness and we found out later that it had crushed amaretti biscuits.

The second time Chef Massimo cooked for us was at a dinner organized by Tita Trillo of Titania to highlight Caliterra wines from Chile. In her invitation, she declared the cooking of the chef was exceptional. He didn?t disappoint. There was beef carpaccio, lamb ravioli with rosemary sauce, beef tenderloin with mashed pumpkin with amaretti biscuits then chocolate pudding with pears and almonds.

Caliterra reserve and award-winning wines perfectly paired with the food. The range encompassed bottles of sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, carmenere, cabernet sauvignon and merlot. Wine master Nicholas Saelzer of Caliterra gave the notes for each of the wines we had and also traced the history of Caliterra from the partnership of Chile?s Chadwick family with California?s Mondavi family in 1996 to its dissolution in 2004, when the Chadwicks bought out the Mondavi shares.

E-mail pinoyfood04@yahoo.com