Spiral's Chef Returns With Curio in QC, Elevating Filipino Home Classics

(SPOT.ph) Curio is a much smaller space than one might expect from someone who once ran operations for Spiral, the massive buffet restaurant that was the main attraction of the currently shuttered Sofitel Philippines Plaza. It seats maybe twenty comfortably inside, with just a few more tables outside. And instead of a hundred-plus dishes, Curio serves around six to eight on any given day, with maybe a couple more on weekends. They’re set up on enameled dutch ovens on a counter, atop some a couple of induction food warmers.

“If I were to start something new,” Chef Bettina Arguelles told her friends back when the Sofitel was closing, “it would have to be something more personal. Something more honest to what I enjoy eating every day.”

The truth is that Curio is just a part of this next phase in Arguelles’ culinary career. There is a door behind the counter that leads to a massive kitchen, which serves as the center of operations for her catering business, Epicura, which she started with her childhood friend Pia Villavicencio Lago. Through Epicura, Arguelles flexes her years of experience putting together banquets and feasts and all manner of culinary logistical feats.

In Curio, though, she’s sharing another aspect of her cooking. “People are always asking my kids, ‘What does your mom cook for you at home?’” Curio provides a clear answer to that question, serving up homecooked fare—if your home cook happens to be a French-trained chef who’s worked for the likes of Daniel Boulud and Wayne Nish.

This isn’t to say that Curio serves fancy fare—quite the opposite actually. Everything we tried on the day of our shoot could reasonably show up on the table of an average home. But a chef necessarily does a lot more thinking about a dish than an average home cook—what makes a recipe work, why a certain ingredient is important, what could be added or pared back to make it just a little bit better. This is the sense we got from Curio’s food: everything is familiar, and nothing is complicated, but all of it is executed at the highest level.

They make everything from scratch, and take no shortcuts. The lengua estofada, for example, isn’t pressure cooked. They make a huge batch and cook it low and slow, really taking the time to tenderize the beef tongue. The lengua is soft but keeps the integrity that tends to get lost with faster cooking methods. The result is still very much lengua estofada, a dish many of us have had at some handaan in some family member’s house. It’s just a remarkably well done version of it.

In the same vein, Curio serves a cheesy tuna casserole. And this is where a chef might have been tempted to fancy it up with maybe a rare cheese or some shaved truffle or whatever. But what Curio serves is unmistakably tuna casserole, with pasta that’s just a little over al dente, tender chunks of salty tuna, and a lot of melty cheese. It is the kind of thing you imagine might be good straight from the fridge the next day, which for tuna casserole might be the highest praise.

They serve cabbage rolls, filled with a mix of beef and pork and smothered in a bright tomato sauce. It’s a family recipe, and Arguelles recalls that when she had relatives over to taste her version at Curio, they said the only thing missing was the toothpick. The same mix of meat in the rolls double as the base for the polpette al forno: these large baked Italian meatballs with mozzarella in the center, served with marinara.

There is still room for Arguelles to play around, though. She finishes her beef pares, for example, with some truffle paste, adding a different dimension of savory flavor to the kanto classic. The Samsui ginger chicken, which is essentially a take on Hainanese chicken, is cooked using sous vide, ensuring that it is cooked uniformly in temperature, resulting in a much more tender, much juicier piece of poultry. 

It should be noted that this might not be what you find when you visit Curio. They’re set up for flexibility, and there is plenty of room for experimentation. “It really is just like when you cook at home,” Arguelles says. “You try to make the best out of what’s available.” Just as a home cook might decide to make something else if an ingredient turns out to be sold out that day or just expensive, Arguelles and her crew will adapt to what’s fresh and what’s available.

But whatever it is they serve up, the guiding principle still seems to be Arguelles’ own personal connection with the food. The dishes are a reflection of her own journey as a chef, taking into account the time she’s spent abroad, and her current experiences. She’s been doing food consultancy lately, and that’s taken her all over the Philippines. Recently, she’s been in Iloilo a lot, and it’s clear that their cuisine has had an effect on her. So, on the day we visited, they were serving kadyos, baboy at langka, perhaps better known by the acronym KBL. She’s also serving a version of calcag, or Ilonggo style dried shrimp as a furikake, or a Japanese rice seasoning. The dried shrimp is mixed with pinipig and seasonings, and offered up as one of the many condiments available to diners in the restaurant. 

Curio makes its own lao gan ma-style chili crisp, which they’ve dubbed “Lao Gan Mom.” It’s offered as a condiment in the restaurant, but you can also buy a jar to take home. The same goes for the calcag furikake. They make their own banana ketchup, which goes very well with the eggplant fritters. They make a sambal, heavy on the onions, which will give a real kick to any of the dishes served at Curio.

Besides all that, Curio also serves a variety of baked goods. This speaks of another aspect of the restaurant: Arguelles says that it’s really meant to serve the community. She wants it to become part of the fabric of Teacher’s Village: the place where residents might quickly pop by to grab a baguette, for example. Someone having visitors over might drop by to pick up a box of cheese bread, maybe, or the absolutely terrific adobo pandesal. Seriously: try the adobo pandesal, with its soft, fluffy bread and perfectly composed twice cooked adobo filling. It is genuinely one of the best things here.

Arguelles says that recently, people who live in the area have been at times stopping by with Tupperware in hand, and taking home a dish or two to have for dinner. It is functioning exactly like a turo-turo, and this feels like a triumph. Many Metro Manila foodies probably miss the sheer excess of Spiral, but it seems that Chef Arguelles is exactly where she wants to be, serving the kind of food she really loves to a community of people that are really getting to know her.

Photos by Majoy Siason