Gallery by Chele's All-Heirloom Rice Menu Goes From Buro Ice Cream to Abalone Arroz Caldo

(SPOT.ph) Rice is life: on that we can all probably agree. In this hellishly sunny archipelago we call home, no real meal is truly complete without it. Heck, the promise of an unlimited amount is legitimately one of modern living’s greatest temptations. Rice can be sweet or savory; be served morning, afternoon, and night; and find a happy home in the stomach of average Juans and lucky beneficiaries of generational wealth alike. And yet, we know and appreciate so little about it.

The Philippines has been growing rice for centuries, long before the Spanish ever thought of sailing west, but we now import so much from other countries. We know it grows in fields, can easily picture a carabao plowing one, but struggle to appreciate the long journey the grain makes to get onto our plates. We look at it in terms of cups, scoops, or as a canvas, a supporting character—not as something that could be the star, or even just be so entwined with our own culture and traditions.

It’s for exactly this reason that Philippine heirloom rice (that is, native varieties grown and treasured for generations) is the focus of the latest tasting menu by Michelin-starred Gallery by Chele, where it appears in nearly every conceivable form it can be tasted, eaten, and enjoyed.

If there is just one thing you must know about Gallery by Chele in BGC, it is that each menu is an exploration, usually of a single proudly local ingredient, following its own team’s actual explorations of techniques, methods, and flavors traveling across the Philippines. Following its previous smash hit degustations highlighting cacao and coconut, this latest menu places front and center grains that are often overlooked beyond the communities that cultivate them: indigenous rice.

“Heirloom rice is one of the Philippines’ most unique products, yet it is still not widely understood,” Chef and owner Chele Gonzalez says. “Many people do not realize that these varieties can be pink, purple, green, yellow, glutinous, or aromatic. Each one reflects a different place and a different community.”

The new menu features varieties from all over the country, but puts special focus on ones that come straight from the ancient stone terraces of the Cordillera region, from long-time partner communities everywhere from Kalinga, Banaue, Ifugao, and Benguet. And in an intriguing step towards advocacy, Gallery by Chele doesn’t just cook the hell out of this rice: it actually gives you the opportunity to take it home with you for P300/500g, with all profits going to the farmers.

“To understand heirloom rice, you need to go to the mountains and meet the people who grow it,” Gonzalez adds. “In many of these communities, rice is not only food. It is part of their identity and culture, and it is connected to traditions that have existed for centuries.”

And so with the weight of tradition and the lightness of experimentation, the Heirloom Rice Project tasting menu (P5,800/six courses, P7,200/10 courses) deliberately, intentionally showcases at least one variety of native Cordillera rice in every dish (not to mention every cocktail and mocktail), and almost always in a different way—and yes, this is exactly as hard as it sounds.

“I think this is one of the most challenging menus we’ve ever had,” chef and co-owner Carlos Villaflor tells Spot.ph. “Because unlike our previous menus like cacao and coconut, rice by itself doesn’t have too much flavor. It doesn’t speak as loudly for itself. It has a nice and aromatic character, but incorporating everything into a 10-course menu?”

He shakes his head, and adds, “At one point, we even asked ourselves, ‘Are we actually just going to serve rice [as it is]?’”

Spoiler: Despite it being the main character of this show, rice only recognizably appears as itself twice in the entire menu. But more on that later. What Gonzales and Villaflor achieve here is a showcase for the dizzying number of forms that heirloom rice can be transfigured into. Yes, you can stew it, fry it, toast it, ground it, and steam it—but in this menu, you’re invited to actually lean in and take a closer look as it takes on even subtler and unexpected incarnations.

Every experience at Gallery by Chele starts off with a little tour of its space as well as some bite-sized experiments and best hits—and it’s here you get a little warm-up, with rice slowly creeping in more and more before the first course even lands in front of you.

Their Welcome just outside their busy kitchen, for instance, features a bite of their chewy take on Japanese mochi, made with ground and pounded Tinawon Violet rice and stuffed with a juicy dalandan jelly. Meanwhile, mad scientist kitchen paradise Stvdio Lab invites you taste perhaps the most shocking bite in the entire lineup: a juicy, and now slightly umami carabao mango shockingly covered in a fluffy white outer layer of penicillium that’ll feel like nothing else you’ve ever put into your mouth—a result of being covered in bubud, a traditional rice-based fermentation starter made of glutinous rice, ginger, and wild roots used to make tapuey rice wine. 

Their Rice Cake Innovation playfully recreates traditional kakanin with heirloom rice flour and modern techniques, with puto made more savory with an addicting goat cheese mousse and tinapa powder combo; a chewy, smoky tupig on a banana leaf spoon; and a sapin-sapin that brings it all home with a fruity ube-langka sweetness and a salty quezo de bola tuile, put together in a pillowy bite as soft as a baby’s cheek.

After much ado—from Coastal Reef’s mini-showcase of Philippine seafood to a set of Gallery by Chele’s signature Tomato Sinigang and Kare Kare Bon Bons with carabao meat—the Heirloom Rice Project really, truly begins with the Mirin Kinilaw, with ultra-fresh Palawan tuna dressed in a mango escabeche made with a lacto-fermented mirin heirloom rice wine. The final touch, and the most hardworking element in the whole dish,is the refreshing, citrusy, and lightly yeasty  rice grain granita dusted over the whole dish: it’s simple, but pushes a familiar dish into very new territory.

The Buro Crab takes us to Pampanga’s own traditional way of fermenting rice: funky ol’ buro, made into an intensely umami ice cream with red rice yeast and ikura, and served with sweet blue crab meat and an aligue emulsion. Meanwhile, the Shio Lobster takes us to Japan with its use of shio garlic, a fermented rice condiment made the Gallery way with heirloom rice, water, salt, and garlic. This is brushed over Zamboanga pitik, or slipper lobster, before it’s beautifully yakitori-grilled and served atop a luscious bed of white ube puree made more umami with emulsified sea urchin.

In Blossom, you see rice fermented into a puree with pumpkin and as a homemade rice vinegar dressing a simple ubud salad to the nines and balancing out the roasted banana heart standing center stage, brushed with spiced chicken oil before the team busts out our local cinnamon, kalingag bark from Negros, to grate over the whole thing.

Even a long-time Gallery by inasal-inspired Chele favorite Fired! Pulpo gets a subtle rice update. (Sorry, it’s not an option for unli-rice.) Octopus is marinated and grilled inasal-style with a uniquely sticky, umami sauce and a chicken skin chicharon made better with just a bit of their homemade vinegar. The Grouper Tapuey follows this up with a steamed local grouper served with homemade miso and tapuey (both made here with heirloom rice!) that do the heavy lifting in a rich and umami buerre blanc sauce.

The Abalone Arroz Caldo is the first and only time that rice is allowed to appear obviously and unmistakably as itself, in the most pimped up lugaw you’ll ever encounter. Beyond a generous amount of tender, slow-cooked abalone, you’ve got firm Unoy Ginnonaw red rice cooked and furiously absorbing a bombastic broth made with the Kalinga-style cured pork called etag, giving it the kind of hearty, comforting smokiness and savoriness that makes you want to ask for seconds (and thirds). 

The Wagyu A5 dials rice’s role back a notch, with the eponymous bistek-inspired steak seasoned with asin Tultul, a heritage salt from Guimaras, and served with a wagyu tartare served on a paper-thin Minaanggan red rice cracker.

Rice does, however, bounce right back in and climbs to its peak in Rice Texturas. No less than six separate heirloom varieties from across the Philippines appear in this dessert, and almost always in different forms that highlight the distinct taste of each—all while paying tribute to where they come from. Cordillera varieties from Banaue and Ifugao are all shaped into rice crackers and tuile shaped and sculpted to rise from the dish like the mountains they call home. Meanwhile, lowland varieties make up these mountains’ foundations: smoky Pangasinan Deremen is used in a creamy arroz con leche, Tapol glutinous rice from Visayas in a suman ice cream, and mature pounded rice from Nueva Ecija in a toasty pinipig. The only thing on this plate that isn’t rice are some grilled lakatans.

The Heirloom Rice Project doesn’t seek to reinvent the wheel: Rice here flits from the foreground to the background, rounds out each dish with flavor and texture. It is the ever-present supporting character who makes the whole show, finally getting its day in the sun and being seen in a new light. It might have been nice, however, to have experienced it as itself a little more in the menu, the better to acquaint ourselves with at least some of these unfamiliar grains.

Still this gesture to put the spotlight on local heirloom rice is truly commendable. Beyond familiar forms like kakanin, crackers, sauces, and porridge, Gallery by Chele shows us how Philippine heirloom rice can push flavor by fermenting it into miso, koji, vinegar, shio garlic, mirin, tapuey, and buro—bringing a modern eye to ancient and traditional techniques that have shaped how people eat for centuries.

“Many people don’t tend to use rice beyond traditional methods like buro,” observes Chef Carlos. “It feels like it just stopped there. We wanted to showcase our native rice and give it depth, a different perspective on what it can be—so that we can help the farmers keep on planting, hoping that these heirloom grains exist for the next generation.” 

Gallery by Chele is at 5/F Clipp Center, 11th Avenue corner, 39th Street, Bonifacio Global City. For reservations and inquiries, contact  0917-546-1673 or visit their website.