Cebu’s seaside stalls

BELIEVE me, Rosa Inihao is real. She owns a seafood restaurant at the Mactan Shrine in Lapu-Lapu City, Cebu. Her customers will testify that she is real.

This much is also true: her restaurant is called No Problem. It competes in a neighborhood of food stalls that Cebuanos call Shoot to Kill.

Shoot to Kill has nothing to do with intent to murder or with a diner’s reaction to a fly doing the breaststroke in his soup. (Hygiene is certified to by local health authorities and Rosa herself is armed with a flyswatter.)

A Cebuano wraps sinugba, tula and kilawin (grilled, soup and raw fish) into the acronym sutukil, and somewhere between his accent and our listening skills the name has evolved into what sounds like Shoot to Kill.

Sutukil is located at the Mactan Shrine where a statue of the warrior Lapu-Lapu has come to symbolize the country’s foreign policy in his time. Had Ferdinand Magellan waded to shore a few centuries later, Shoot to Kill would probably be a more hospitable and far satisfying spot today.

My friends and I arrived under much friendlier terms, via the Mactan Airport on the 7 a.m. flight from Manila, and were met by the very civil city mayor, Ernest Wiegel. He whisked our group off to Shoot to Kill since our business appointment in Cebu City wasn’t scheduled until four hours later. The ride to No Problem restaurant took 10 minutes.

We surprised Rosa when we walked into No Problem, a street-level eatery of some 200 sq m with wide windows for a fine view of mangroves, seagulls, blue sky and the sea. Rosa, who is her early 40s, was wearing sleeveless shirt and a pair of shorts. Those must be her work clothes when choosing the day’s fresh vegetables and fresh fish.

Besides being the owner, she is cashier and manager. The dual roles are a practical matter for an entrepreneur like her with a bank loan of P700,000 with 24 percent interest annually. Close supervision and the cooking skills she learned from her mother, grandmother and friends help her keep up with the payments on interests and principal.

Our early arrival guaranteed us not only fresh food but also the best seats for a view of the sea. We were able to tell time by watching a ship in the horizon sailing from far left to far right.

No Problem stood on the seashore, but the low tide had receded to about a kilometer away. The mangroves showed their dark roots on the wet ground. The smell of the light breeze was strange because it was free of fumes of diesel and gasoline. Seagulls flapped their wings as they flew from one mangrove to another. We left our culinary fate to the mayor. He asked for sinugbang kitong, tulang mamsa, kilawin, pinakuluang pasayan and adobong pusit. The choices were endorsed by Mar Roxas, the visiting trade secretary and himself an expert on seafood because he comes from the fishing city of Capiz. Marino Fernan and Ricky Poca, both Cebuanos, liked the choices, too, and appealed for delivery as soon as possible. I nodded my approval as if it mattered. Rosa herself took down the orders, retreated to the kitchen, downloaded the orders and reappeared five minutes later.

The cooking, she said, would take half an hour, more or less. We cringed at the thought of dead time. If we were business consultants paid by the minute and holed out in a conference room, we would brainstorm to solve serious national problems like the Abu Sayyaf, the P145-billion deficit, the high cost of medicine, and electoral posters on walls that could be pasted over with health-related bills like Bawal ang Umihi Dito. But at No Problem, with its fishing-town ambience, the sense of place overwhelmed us. Our dialogues took easy turns instead.

Life after politics was one.

When his mayoralty term ends this month, Wiegel plans to put up a do-good group (as in NGO) that hopefully will help transform small entrepreneurs into millionaires. For his beneficiaries, Wiegel need not look farther than his nose. Start with Rosa and the others restaurateurs, Roxas suggested, for they are live seafood for loan sharks. Wiegel can work out terms with Roxas’ Small Business Guarantee and Financing Corp.

Roxas then gave Rosa his cell phone number. She pledged she would honor him with a call. She also asked for an autograph.

Filling up the time took surprising turns, and the Cebuanos couldn’t resist taking mild digs at the Tagalogs. How come the langgam in Cebu flies while the langgam of Manila only crawls? The dialect of Cebu is more precise than Tagalog or Pilipino -- a Cebuano knows bana is a husband but the Tagalog does not know if asawa refers to the husband or the wife.

Soon, the kitchen wards of Rosa arrived. We attacked the morning offerings like we were piranhas. All that was left of the fish in the sour broth were the spines. We cleared plates of sinugba, tula and pasayan. The adobong pusit that swam in its ink was devoured until all our smiles revealed darkened teeth.

Restaurants at Shoot to Kill are not classy places where chefs with HRM degrees wear white toques and aprons. What lures diners to seafood stalls like No Problem?

It must be the sun, the sky and the sea, the mangroves and the low tide, the fresh harvests of fish and vegetables, the conversation and the sense of place. All this adds up to good dining. And yet the bill, which Wiegel paid, was not big enough to make you shoot to kill.