The Tagaytay Food and Wine Festival Celebrates Its Dining Scene's Gleaming New Era

(SPOT.ph) Tagaytay has always had food, but it’s hard to think of it as having a food community. There are the recognizable names: Breakfast at Antonio’s, Bag of Beans, Marcia Adams’ and the like, which have been weekend destinations for over a decade or more. But they all exist apart from each other, all of them doing their own thing, catering to their own set of loyal customers that have made these places part of a regular weekend excursion.

Apart from those places, the image of Tagaytay as a food destination is one of competition: various bulalo or buko pie places claiming to have the best version of the dish. Or the original version. Or maybe the most innovative version. Or maybe the one with the best view. The whole place seems designed to spark an argument, each place vying to be the top in some specific metric, leading to various debates on the Internet about which of these places one ought to go.

But it’s different now. Or at least, that’s what the recent Tagaytay Food and Wine Festival wants to project. Chef Rhea Castro-Sycip, head of the festival and one of the chefs at The Fatted Calf, mentioned in her opening remarks that they’re in a new era of Tagaytay dining: one marked by cooperation and community.

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What went down at the Tagaytay Food & Wine Festival and the state of their local dining scene:

The festival’s opening event, the Grand Tasting, was certainly a show of force meant to convey that message. The dinner included eleven chefs, representing fifteen restaurants around the Tagaytay area, serving what amounted to a massive buffet of dishes. Among them: festival head Rhea Castro-Sycip, offering a variety of desserts from The Flour Pot; Chris Leaning, head chef at host venue Anya Resort, serving iberico pork skewers and paella; Robby Goco of Cyma fame, previewing his soon-to-open Tagaytay restaurant Elaia; Happy Ongpauco-Tiu, serving signature dishes from her restaurants Pamana and Tsokolateria; Hon. Aniela Tolentino, representative of Cavite’s fourth district, also representing her Kapampangan restaurant Binulo and her craft brewery Papa Bolo.

Kalel Chan of Farmer’s Table. Binggoy Remedios of Asador Dos Mestizos. The list goes on. Also of note, the festival made room for Slow Food Community Cavite, an NGO dedicated to promoting the food heritage of the province, putting farmers front and center and serving dishes derived from fresh produce harvested locally.

This is the new Tagaytay, they seem to be declaring. It is an era of chef-driven restaurants, and the chefs are all eager to work together. The festival emerges as a coming out party for this newly evolved scene; a show of force from this gang of chefs that want to turn the city into an active destination for diverse cuisine. The old favorites are still there, of course, and the people who regularly visit Antonio's will never lose it. The bulalo devotees will never run out of places to try. But a new kind of foodie can visit the city now and find all manner of exciting meals.

There are the Filipino-inflected ribs of Ribchon, served up with a variety of sauces like a Barako barbecue or a spicy tanglad oil. There is the American style barbecue of Reynaldo's Smokehouse, which uses local wood like santol and sampaloc to smoke their briskets and pulled pork. There are the Spanish flavors offered up by the likes of Chele Gonzales and Binggoy Remedios, and the heritage crop-focused meals at the Sycips’ The Fatted Calf. Tagaytay has long been known for the familiar; this new scene is all about creating new experiences.

We've witnessed plenty of standout collaboration dinners between acclaimed chefs at restaurants in Manila; this, too, is something we see more in Tagaytay today. With that, the second night of the festival featured what they called a ‘heritage dinner,’ with the Sycips inviting Jeremie Go of Davao's Pilgrim to cook a six course meal with them. Once again, the festival reinforced the theme of cooperation, bringing attention to a regional chef who's been doing great work. The meal itself was very mindful of its use of local produce, offering a spotlight to ingredients like buffalo paneer, chang-ak rice, and bu-o mushroom.

The weekend after, the celebration went opulent with caviar, black truffles, and wine at a dinner dubbed Luxe at 180, held at Chef Sau del Rosario's 180° restaurant. Joined by chefs John Buenaventura, executive chef for Emirates Flight Catering, and Oliver Buenviaje, founder of luxury catering purveyor Olios Fine Food, the Kapampangan chef fashioned a six-course truffles and caviar menu with the occasional Filipino elements. Think: steamed corn "taho" a la suwam na mais, adorned with Sturia caviar; lobster aligue ravioli in lemongrass bisque topped with shaved Perigord black truffle; and a main course of aged duck over a kamote mash and shaved truffle-topped brick of potato dauphinoise.

So what is a trip to Tagaytay, nowadays? It's hard to imagine not wanting to have bulalo, or a big, hearty meal at Antonio's. But there are certainly more options now; options that speak of an evolving community of chefs that have been given the room to strut their stuff. It's the kind of thing that might make a day trip turn into a whole weekend, with the variety of taste experiences deserving of some extra time spent in this mountain town.

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