Filipinos still love native cuisine

CONTRARY to popular belief,

Filipinos are not really fond of

foreign cuisine. At the end of the

day, Filipinos still love eating Filipino food such as the good

old sinigang, sizzling sisig and lechon.

These Filipino home-made favorites as well as new

concoctions are what the newly opened Gen San Seafood

Patio and Bar along Jupiter Street, Makati, brings to the table

with the tuna panga flown straight from General Santos as

the specialty dish. (Hence the name.)

Gen San owner and executive

chef Ma. Teresa A. Alejandro

says the restaurant has enjoyed

overwhelming patronage since it

opened in October due mainly to

its positioning as a comfortable

restaurant with good food at

affordable prices.

"We wanted a restaurant that is

an answer to the times because

these days people are looking

for good food at reasonable prices. We should understand

that not all people who work in the area are in the executive

level," Alejandro says.

To differentiate itself from other restaurants that have

sprouted all over Makati, Alejandro says Gen San created a

fiesta ambiance where people will not think twice about

going in and where they can get good value for their money.

She adds that Gen San also wanted to concentrate on

seafood from General Santos since these are considered the

best in the country.

"In my family, they would always rave about the seafood

places in the south especially the tuna panga. So when we

were thinking about putting up a restaurant, I thought about

bringing the panga of Gen San here since not many people

can afford to go to the south," Alejandro says.

Alejandro says Gen San was actually in the making for more

than a year as she started experimenting dishes in a

fast-food stall in Manuela just to make sure that she got

everything down right.

"This is my first venture into a full service restaurant so I

had to be careful. This is a big investment so I tried it out in

a stall just to get a certain amount of confidence. After one

year, I felt I was ready," Alejandro says.

She closed down her stall in Manuela and opened the Gen

San restaurant on Oct. 22, 1999 with most of her kitchen staff

tagging along with her.

The restaurant was designed with green and maroon as the

primary colors. It is a contemporary restaurant as Alejandro

wants to stay away from the native look so common among

Filipino restaurants.

Alejandro prepares the dishes herself and handles the

backroom operations. Her partner, 27-year-old Arthur C.

Tangco, on the other hand, handles the front operations

such as the bar, the waiters and the cleaning staff.

Tangco is also confident about meeting with the customers

and making sure that operations run smoothly as he has

been trained in the hotel industry abroad with Western

cuisine as his specialty.

He also has a small canteen in UERM where he also tested

different dishes before preparing the best for Gen San.

"We have received good feedback and our traffic has been

improving by 50 percent weekly," Alejandro says.

Aside from the panga, Gen San's specialties include the

sisig, crispy pata and sinigang with the buko pandan as the

very popular dessert.

Tangco says Gen San is also preparing different promotions

such as bottomless drinks to continue attracting new

customers to the restaurant.

"We want to attract the young crowd, the young executives

and we want to keep them," Tangco says.

Tangco says they do not mind if sometimes they have to be

at work for more than 10 hours a day even stretching to past

two in the morning as long as they see their customers

happy.