How quickly will Filipinos scarf down the gastronomic approval of a book that, as French book purveyor and reviewer Livres Hebdo observes, no one reads or buys anymore?
A certain class of diners understands the hype of the Michelin guidebook’s arrival in the Philippines. Tasting menus and curated food experience have lately been something like a sporting event for the local food and beverage industry. They represent a break on the chain and a flex of local culinary talent. More adventurous tastes and deeper pockets, whetted by social media, now have somewhere else to go other than formulaic restaurant chains that have become a pastiche of global commercial gastronomy transplanted to our metropolises. The chefs and restaurateurs changing up the Philippine food scene deserve this platform for acclaim and peak marketing.
The national ambition also rightfully throbs for recasting the Philippines among its Southeast Asian peers drawing hordes of tourists with their food scenes.
Thailand and Vietnam respectively welcomed 35 million and 17 million international arrivals in the last year, making them two of the top Southeast Asian destinations. It is no accident that US President Barack Obama and sainted foodie Anthony Bourdain could plonk without fuss on stools in a boui-boui in Vietnam. They knew the streets were where it’s at.
So the Michelin guidebook finally deigned to make a detour to the Philippines. It still counts as an anointment of sorts. Of what exactly, it’s become harder to tell. Many critics purporting Michelin’s huis clos tactics over the last 30 years admit that these have not blunted its influence on chefs and gourmets. Chefs and restaurateurs would still flog themselves over stars, and pop culture has glazed the reach as a heroic, tragicomic quest. Think J-drama Netflix series Grand(e) Maison Tokyo, which tells the roiling upward battle of a disgraced, proverbially eccentric Japanese chef in Paris rebuilding his own three-star Michelin restaurant in Tokyo.
It will take more than French gastronomic approval before a comforting, value-for-money meal on an ordinary hour in the streets of Manila is normalized. We would always have to google where it’s good, and pay extra for something different. In the Philippines, the Michelin Guide beat the actual arrival of food abundance and diversity that were the preconditions for the culinary renown of Vietnam and Thailand.
The Michelin guide came at a time local food prices might be begging primordial questions about local food security: “should we even be eating rice at all?”, implies the government’s toothless maximum suggested retail price of P49 per kilo of rice. In 2024, we were treated to food inflation of as high as 4 percent in July. In January this year, food inflation was at 3.8 percent, which thankfully slowed to 2.1 percent in February.
Still, local supply of other basic foodstuffs has hardly been sufficient for our growing population with an alarming hunger and malnutrition problem. This, even as the mention of importation (as important for diversity as it is for food affordability) generally rankles.
With the Michelin pressure on their backs, local chefs are on a race to outlast bottomlines. It might not be a problem for restaurants with clout and capital, but this state of things will also stifle independents who are vectors of creativity.
Food prices have not exactly been a savory point in our come hither tourism campaigns. They also certainly aren’t for us local food consumers on the daily.
The pinch is not limited to the majority of the population, for whom food is survival. Even the middle classes who turn to guidebooks and restaurant reviews are on a constant haggle: daily lunch for a young professional is either at least P700 at the business districts, or P200 for rice and two viands, taken away from the side streets in knotted up plastic and reeking of reused oil. We cannot be fine dining all the time.
It’s fair to say the quality of our usually unregulated street food, with their penury of fresh fruits and vegetables, will not provide the setting for a tête à tête between a head of state and an itinerant celebrity. There will be no catch-all tourism marketing on our streets of the culinary haven that we are supposed to have become overnight.
This is the ambience of the Michelin Guide’s arrival in the Philippines. In other world cities and known gastronomic centers, good food could be served at every street corner. This is their real draw. The corner pâtisseries in Paris, the night markets of Taipei, uncle and aunty’s stall in a hawker in Singapore, nonna’s cooking in Roma — delectation in the random.
The Philippines has got it backwards — we haven’t gotten out of our food security doldrums yet, but we want to boast of our food scene in the highest places. Where is it good to eat here? A huge swathe of 120 million people are the real anonymous inspectors.
(Marc Romff is the pen name of a writer who graduated with an MA Anthropology degree from the University of the Philippines.)