Techniques, Transformations, and Filipino Nostalgia Make Up Taupe Dining's New Tasting Menu

(SPOT.ph) Before the Scientific Revolution gave us the robust understanding of the world as it’s known today, the Ancient Greeks held everything in the world to be made up of four fundamental substances: air, earth, fire, and water—each of which has their own properties and abilities.

These four also come into play in the kitchen, Taupe Dining’s Chef Francis Tolentino points out, in that they each have ways of bringing out different qualities in different foods. “The idea of the elements really struck me because they’ve always been so deeply connected to cooking, even in its most primal form,” Tolentino tells SPOT.ph. “Before there were recipes or tools, we had fire, water, air, and earth to transform ingredients.”

One need not be a professional chef or alchemist to see this in practice over day-to-day tasks in the kitchen: Water, simmering or boiling in a pot over the stove, can heat, cook, and coax out flavors from the ingredients in it. Fire, be it from the grill or oven, cooks meats and browns their outer surface in the process. Air dries out moisture from fresh produce and other ingredients, changing the texture and concentrating the taste; it’s also key to making light, crisp, and/or fluffy baked goods. Smoke imbues onto other mediums its raspy aroma and depth of flavor. And from the earth, salt amplifies flavor, and when left in contact with certain ingredients for enough time, allows lacto-fermentation to take place.

 

Looking to emphasize this connection, Tolentino and his team put their gears to work, and the result is Taupe Dining’s exceptional new tasting menu dubbed Elements. Each course, we're told, is a creative interpretation of how nature transforms food. That is, each dish in the lineup comes to fruition through a combination of cooking methods—smoking, fermenting, grilling, baking, and so on—taking after the four elements, as applied to a global and local, seasonal ingredients.

“[The idea of elements vis-a-vis cooking] felt like the perfect foundation for a menu that’s both rooted and experimental,” says Tolentino. “Each element offers such a different energy and technique, and I loved the challenge of translating that into flavors, textures, and storytelling.”

Tolentino has long held a bit of an exploratory spirit: “I genuinely enjoy playing around with new techniques. I think it keeps things alive in the kitchen.” Yet he balances this creativity with a clear strategy and intention to give the menu a cohesive storyline and structure. “With this menu, it wasn’t just about doing something flashy, but really thinking about how each element could shape the ingredient differently. Like how smoke from fire brings depth, or how fermentation [representing the earth] changes the soul of an ingredient. That kind of transformation is something I find really exciting.”

Although Elements (P6,500/eight courses, P7,800/10 courses) retains a distinct Filipino theme similar to Taupe’s earlier menus (particularly in their seafood courses!), it seems Tolentino and his team take inspiration from a wider range of cuisines this time around. The menu flows with clear intent regardless, with nothing disjoint or out of place. Elements is best experienced with their beverage pairing options, all designed by Taupe’s resident mixologist Radge Egar—you can do wine or cocktails (as we did), or even go zero-proof.

Tropical-tasting soursop is used as a base for a squiggle of espuma which crowning the Guyabano Cloud, at the base of which is a tart of sweet potato. There’s grilled and poached river prawn, whose subtle char adds depth to the custard butter that fills the Prawn Butter Brioche. To go with these in the cocktail-pairing set, Egar serves the Iuventud—a zippy opening drink of ARC Black Bamboo Gin, guava, tamarillo, and salabat soda.

Processes like heating and freezing have the ability to change a food's temperature, which in turn changes how they register on the tongue—a feat we see in the Blue Crab Ice Cream Sandwich. This cold bite has poached blue crab that’s frozen into savory ice cream, thus tempering its natural sweetness before it's zuzhed up with mango jam, cold smoked roe, and Oscietra caviar. From there, the crab mix is sandwiched in between paper-thin sheets of chicken skin that's baked, dehydrated, then fried to a perfect crackly crispness.

The Winter Melon Salad puts the spotlight on the oft-overlooked, delicate-tasting gourd known as kundol. Taupe looks to the power of water and air here, simmering the gourd and and allowing it to soak in a brine with yuzu and ponzu. The soft, citrusy strips are then layered with pear, kaong (!), onion butter, and gin-infused salmon pearls that are an absolute delight to eat. Then there’s the Hokkaido Scallops & Corn, where fresh, juicy scallops cured in kombu are smoked just a touch for added depth without fully cooking its flesh. It comes perched over golden, gleaming corn “cappuccino,” burnt coconut froth for nutty depth, and a drizzle of shrimp oil for a bit of a crab-and-corn esque moment.

The element of smoke makes its way back to our tables in the Smoked Iberico Skewers, made with Iberico pluma skewered in sugarcane and smoked, then topped with mushroom mousse and partnered with pear salsa. Its spirit-forward partner is Mayumi, spiked with Pisco Bauza Reservado brandy and Mancino Bianco Ambranto vermouth, and flaunting a floral profile from orange chamomile liqueur, sampaguita, and a berry-flora aero foam. Neutralizing our taste buds afterwards is 24K Magic, a palate cleanser of fermented guava jelly with subtle zing, and a lime-pandan syrup zuzhed up with gold dust (!) that glimmers as it's poured over.

Soon our server comes over to uncover (literally from a glass cloche) the protein of our first main course. Out comes smoke, which clears up to unveil chunks of Dry-Aged Duck—that’s French duck, aged for two weeks and smoked over Himalayan salt.

Then we come to the A5 Wagyu Balbacua, whose initial presentation is quite surprising: on the plate are silky sheets of roasted pepper and corn pasta pasta with a bit of a block-stripe appearance. The server pours over a deep brown, aromatic sauce—one of beef tendons that have been cooking for about eight hours (!!!), we’re told. Cut into the pasta and inside you’ll find strips of A5 Wagyu, gleaming and juicy from being grilled and smoked over binchotan, over a nutty puree of kadiyos. 

The theatrics continue in the Burnt Brazo, a bit of a remixed-brazo de mercedes-meets-baked alaska sort of situation that’s memorable on all fronts. It initially comes as a cloud-like blob of meringue on the plate, but a blank space this ain’t. The team brings out a smoking-hot chunk of binchotan that they stamp onto the meringue, immediately torching the surface and adding an inviting smoky aroma. Inside the brazo are passionfruit custard, calamansi, and frozen vanilla egg custard for a bit of a hot-and-cold contrast. There’s a surprising touch of spicy heat somewhere in the meringue that heightens this interplay of temperatures—but our lips are zipped at its source.

2024 was a big year for Taupe Dining—so much so that it’s hard to believe the first fine-dining concept by the Forefront Lifestyle Group is just a bit past one and a half years old. They were a hit in BGC upon opening in January 2024, and they especially gained footing with the Rockwell community with their Balmori Suites pop-up that took place toward the latter part of the year. There’s a lot to come for them later this 2025 as well—more on that soon—but this latest release of theirs invites us to take a step back and consider the beginnings behind, and journeys toward, their finished work. Oh, what delightful works are produced from them.