Lucky you, Jack, eating at FL is a privilege very few can enjoy but I do believe you get your $$ worth dining there.
Well, the latest on our end is that last Saturday my best friend Jesse and his wife Cathy came by for dinner. We hadn't seen each other for a few months and I'd promised a meat-heavy feast. Part of the plan was also to teach Jesse how to cook some of these dishes, in short, to
sulsul First thing we did was to show them the menu for dinner in our make-believe restaurant
YeTi avec Platypus is the name of our pretension, YeTi being the concatenation of Yelena and Tito, and just in case our customers ask for a dish of "yeti," we'll tell them it comes with a side of egg-laying mammal
We've also adopted that "Radio Flyer" tricycle with a steering handle as a logo because in our little restaurant, you might think you're the one driving/cooking but there's always someone backseating and trying to steer besides you
Our Spanish-Italian appetizer course, below, was simply a mix of hot Sopressata sausage, homemade garlic bread, and a "Bacalao" dish. I enclose Bacalao in quotes because instead of thicker codfish, I used thin slices of salt-preserved Pollack bought from our nearby supermarket. I put Jesse to work peeling the potatos, cooking them in boiling water for ~10 minutes then setting them aside. We also boiled the Bacalao to remove the saltiness (quick shortcut rather than soaking thicker cuts of codfish overnight), lightly coated it with flour then pan fried and set aside. Then I had Jesse cook the "sofrito" or base for the dish. This was simply a sautee of onions in olive oil with some diced tomatoes and roasted pimientos. Finally, we combine the sausage, potatos and bacalao, you could mix up everything on your plate, top it on a piece of bread, et voila!--
The difficulty for our dining guests was that they had to try to "stagger" their eating. For the appetizer, I told them to fill up just a fourth of their tank as we had a long way to go. I had estimated the whole gorge-fest would take 5 hours and, indeed it took that long. For our next couse, we went exclusively Korean with about 2 lbs of pork belly bulgogi, barbequed on a tabletop grill complemented by another 3 lbs of 72 hour sous-vide'd galbi chim spare ribs which was then deep fried for 1 minute. Shown below is my preferred way of eating it-- instead of using lettuce to wrap the spare-rib, why not use the pork-belly bulgogi?
By now our guests were supposed to be 1/2 full.
But unfortunately, our guests weren't following our ground rules
So we had to put off making the curry potatos and decided the "lemon-stuffed" Turbo Chicken below was gonna be "pabaon." I included Turbo chicken in the menu because at one time during the early '90s, Jesse and I used to love this dish whenever we visited our barkada (Erik Lacson) and his mom used to make this on weekends. Turboing isn't as popular here in the US and my intent here was to bring back those memories.
And the reason we didn't touch the Turbo chicken was because of one dish that's even more memorable for us. Back in the late '80s through the early '90s, I used to frequent this shack beside Bob and Joe's at the corner of Jupiter St and Makati Ave. Hossein's kebabs became a nightly staple for me coming home from school in ACTC and eventually I took all my friends there and it had become a hangout. We patronized Hossein until he moved into his first location in Makati Avenue and when I first moved to the US and came back for vacation, his restaurant was the first I'd visit. At one point I told him that I'd been around a lot of places in the US and his kebabs were the best! (He took me to his kitchen then and told me to repeat the same to his chefs.)
Fast forward several years, one of my closest friends (and common friend with rtsyrtsy), Robby V had told he and his wife had reverse-engineered Hossein's kebabs and he told me the "secret marinade" for beef tenderloin. But as I'd seen with Hossein from those early years, a charcoal grill was needed, so I didn't make an attempt. A couple months ago, however, I'd been thinking about it again and attempted to do it with our electric grill, oven and broiler... but always failed, the meat got too tough. Then I thought of using another method and putting my Iwatani torch to use. Basically, the idea is to torch the outside of the meat to sear it, then finish on the broiler for 3 to 3.5 minutes per "side".
This, my friends, was close enough to the original and I'm happy to achieve this considering the constraints of our kitchen. Add in a simple green chutney-- cilantro, mint, jalapeno, sugar, salt and lemon juice, basmati rice and, boy o boy, this part of the meal transported us back to Makati Ave. I cooked over 5 lbs of kebabs and this was definitely the highlight of the dinner.
As for dessert, our guests begged off the Lemon tart which the missus had planned and so we settled with some Lemon ice cream and coffee while we were wrapping the pabaon, menu attached
Kitchen shot, please click below for a larger picture. Yeti avec Platypus now closed for the night.
Thanks for reading!