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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