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Traveling on a warm stomach
Source: Inquirer
Author: Lolita R. Lacuesta
Date: 1999-12-29
 
This resto in Davao offers good

Filipino fare and 56 calendars



TUCKED in a corner a little off the

highway just as one enters Tagum

City in Bonifacio Street is Arman's.

Owned by a husband-and-wife

team, Emilia and Felicisimo Reyes

Jr., it offers good Filipino food. For

the traveler who might have missed

a meal in any of Davao City's

numerous restaurants, turo-turo, ambulant food stalls or,

indeed, at home, there is always a meal waiting to catch up on in

Arman's.



Arman's originated as a three-table cantina in 1975 in the same

spot it occupies now. As with most family-run businesses, it

was spurred by a need created by a growing family. Emilia and

Felicisimo, their four children in tow, had moved into the then

municipality of Tagum in 1972 in search of a better life, and soon

realized their opportunities were limited.



Emilia, half-Mandaya and from neighboring Asuncion town, did

not have much of an education. Felicisimo thought of finding

work as a pedicab driver. Fate in the form of a friend set him in

the direction of Arman's: the dust and pollution would not be

good for his health, this friend counseled; why not open an

eating place? He would teach Felicisimo and Emilia all he knew

about lutong pang-restoran, this friend said. And this was the

beginning; wife and husband did the daily marketing and

cooking and sat as cashier while the children washed plates and

waited on tables when not going to school. In search of a name

for their cantina, they found it in Arman the baby.



Family business



Now, 24 years later, Emilia attends to the 23-table restaurant

with the help of two children (twins Fernando and Efren), a

son-in-law and grandchildren. She still wakes up at 3 a.m. to do

the marketing and cooking herself, to make sure that the giant

kalderos full of steaming hot food start coming out of her

kitchen from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m., Mondays to Saturdays. She is 56

years old, and mighty proud of Arman's. The 2,083-sq.-m. corner

they rented on a hope and a wish in 1975 has been in the family

since 1986, offering ample parking space for the company vans

and the pick-ups and Pajeros that speak of the clientele her

restaurant has kept through the years.



The restaurant offers the same dependable fare every day: baka

nilaga or calderata, native chicken tinola, afritada, baboy

sinigang or dinuguan or adobo, paksiw na isda and, my

favorites, dabong with gata and mongo with gata. If one arrives

early enough, there are mangoes in season for dessert; if not,

there is always the hearty binignit complete with camote, saba

bananas, ube and gabi that are invariably malagkit and smooth

to the bite, not watery and grainy.



A small table on the side offers mangoes (again, if arriving early

enough) and delicacies in handy packages for pasalubong, all

made in the vicinity (banana chips, pastillas and boat tarts

made of durian of course, popcorn, peanut brittle and other

goodies).



Aside from office workers, Arman's has found its target market:

This is the Pinoy traveler, carrying with him the need to reach

his destination on a stomach assured of good food, and

partaking of this food stress-free, since all of it is cooked in a

familiar manner courtesy of Emilia, and all are lined up in giant

kalderos, turo-turo-style, so one sees what one gets.



For the Pinoy traveler to whom the Pan-Philippine Highway,

eating at Arman's is like eating at home, for the fare, being the

same every day, is a comfort zone: one knows the caldereta will

taste the same today as it did at the last trip.



The caldereta, by the way, is the first to go of all the sud-an.

The day my driver Ronnie and I ate lunch there, which was

about noontime, it was somewhere at the bottom of its kaldero.

But, some things (thankfully) still being sacred, the meat was as

tender as my memory of it and s-o-o-o tasty from hours of

gentle cooking.



Only decoration



The traveler knows, too, that the calendars, the only obvious

decoration on the restaurant's walls, will be there--all 56 of them

this year.



The practice started about eight years ago when a

salesman-habitue gave Arman's his company's 12-page calendar

for the year, the kind my grandmother used to ask from her

Chinese suki every year, with large numbers for days and tide

heights in red and blue.



Other salesmen and proprietors who frequented the restaurant

thought of a great advertising idea and, dili papire (Visayan for

''not wanting to give an edge to the competition''), wanted to see

their calendars on Arman's walls, too.



Arman's has received calendars for their walls each year, with

the numbers increasing over the years. This year's collection

features the business concerns of a bustling economy in Davao.

There are also calendars featuring rural banks, a cooperative,

manufacturing companies, marketing companies, trucking

companies, construction parts and supply stores, hardware

stores and ''a producer and dealer of quality registered and

certified palay seeds'' and several of buyers and sellers of farm

products such as copra, corn, cacao and coffee. Emilia says the

calendars start arriving in November and are put up on the first

day of the new year. Remove any and someone will complain.



So now those who leave Davao City to go north have a reliable

restaurant open from 5 a.m. (sorry, Emilia cooks only once a

day; the food runs out about 2 p.m., and no orders are taken),

that took its name from a baby (and kept it) and is probably the

only restaurant in the country with a gallery of 56 calendars for

the last year of the 1900s.
 

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