The Latest Must-Try Tasting Menu in Town Is in This Project 8 QC Bakuran

Bakuran Tasting Club
Teresa Village, 20 Carmel Avenue, Project 8, Quezon City
Open only for dinners Fridays to Sundays
Visit @bakurantastingclub.mnl for reservations

(SPOT.ph) If you’re hoping to experience face-creasing sourness from the inaugural menu of Quezon City’s Bakuran Tasting Club, you’ll be quite disappointed. It’s an ode to asim, yes, but also a reconfiguring of our concept of what’s maasim. It’s not just all about “asim-kilig.” Asim can be subtle. It can be brightness. It can be a refreshing burst of acidity that approaches sweetness.

By using a range of souring agents from familiar (calamansi) to the unexpected (Sagada honey?!), the 29-year old chef Lee Jan Anicas is saying there’s more to asim than we think. “Asim is not sharpness but clarity,” his menu reads. “Not all sourness behaves the same - calamansi brightens, tamarind lingers, while fermentation deepens. In Chef Lee’s kitchen, “each expression is used with intention, allowing acidity to shape and steady the dish in its own way.”

Chef Lee’s humble, eight-seater private dining operation is located in a residential area in Project 8, Quezon City—-where he also resides. In short, he opened his first restaurant in his own “bakuran.” And isn't it the most ideal situation that your work is only a few minutes away from your home? But that’s not why he named his first restaurant Bakuran; it’s because the word suggests a place where people gather, and in the Philippines, when people gather in bakurans, there’s often food at the center.

Nothing about Bakuran Tasting Club’s facade says “this way to a tasting menu experience.” Once a nail salon and pawnshop, it’s now a kitchen slash dining space that evokes the comforts of a modest Filipino home. Not only is the long, narrow space (“where everything is literally within an arm’s reach,” Chef Lee jokes) outfitted with a display of wooden kitchen implements, native bags, and local produce, Chef Lee and his team are also the most gracious, attentive hosts one can wish for when dining out. In fact, Chef Lee himself opens the door to the restaurant when you arrive.

The meal begins with a piece of toasted sourdough focaccia, whose starter was fed with fermented tomato water. The bread is served with butter infused with honey from Sagada, a variety that Chef Lee says has a subtle acidity. There are no fireworks here; no obvious asim if that’s what you’re looking for, especially that the butter has been topped with aged cheddar. There’s just balance which, it turns out, is what the chef is really after.

Things pick up as soon as the Sipit Pomelo arrives on the long stone table, all pink and dainty, a savory tartlet sitting on a soup jar. The pastry contains meat from Mindoro crabs, dressed with patis from Malabon and palm sugar or panutsa. It is topped with pomelo fermented in its own juice to replicate the taste when the fruit is at its sweetest. The bite is a rainbow of flavors and textures—sweet, sour, salty, soft, crunchy, etc.—but everything’s in hushed tones. The bolder flavors come when you open the lid of the soup jar, and it’s all in the form of a hearty, warming, throat-clearing peppery seafood broth perfect for the rainy evening we visited.

The Sipit Pomelo is one of four dishes in the 9-course menu that makes us confident enough to say Chef Lee is a chef to watch. His Kinilaw Biasong is an excellent play on balance, where tanigue cured in kombu sits at the center of a shallow pond of sukang tuba, coconut, prawn oil, and an in-house XO sauce.

His Kordero Kamatis is a striking bowl of orange shades, but also a dish composed of a really delicious lamb cooked until fork-tender and then shredded— only to be assembled again into bite-sized lamb meat that’s equal parts fat and laman, then seared in duck fat for added linamnam. It’s so good but it’s not even the star, if you ask Chef Lee: it’s the sauce made of fermented Baguio tomatoes blended with roasted peppers and prawn oil.

A dish that’s most personal to the chef is the Pato Gumamela, a beautifully composed plate of duck from La Union with crispy malagkit rice hiding beneath a fully purple, almost black, crispy talbos ng kamote leaf. What trickery was involved in making that one single leaf crispy and flawlessly intact shape-wise, we can’t tell you—we forgot to ask!—but it says a lot about the thought and care invested in this inaugural menu.

What we know for sure is that the dry-aged duck meat is perfectly firm and chewy, and the crispy skin just a lovely bonus. But it’s the sauce it partly sits on that Chef Lee is most proud of: a wine-colored syrup that’s actually gumamela juice reduction mixed with duck stock for extra richness. And this is why it’s personal: the acidity here comes from the gumamela whose juice, says Chef Lee, has asim. He knows this because his lola makes tea out of it, with a squeeze of calamansi; it’s her pampagising, an alternative to coffee. Meanwhile, his lolo, who is Chinese, loves duck. The dish is Chef Lee’s tribute to both his grandparents.

Chef Lee spent part of his growing up years in Binondo, which only means he was spoiled for choice when it came to food. “I had the advantage of good food, a rich culture, so doon na-pique yung interest ko. I really want to learn how to cook certain dishes.” His education continued later on when, as a young man, he realized he needed to cook “for survival,” he half-jokes—because, while his lolo was a kusinero, his parents both didn’t know how to cook.

The young chef has been cooking professionally since he was 17, with stints at Dusit Thani, I’m Hotel and The Moment Group. “I’ve been cooking for over a decade now,” he says. “I really love it.” He loves cooking so much he essentially skipped college—he only finished one sem, despite his mother’s protests —and went straight to carving out a culinary career for himself. “I don’t see myself doing anything else.”

With the kind of promise his maiden menu for Bakuran Tasting Club offers, maybe Chef Lee staying in his own lane—or in this case his own bakuran—may not be such a bad thing. If he’s successfully changed our POVs  when it comes to the range of asim, who knows what he’ll be opening our minds to next?