Sarap London
In the kitchen of a hot new bistro-style restaurant in London’s swanky Mayfair, a young Filipino chef-restaurateur is tweaking a sinigang recipe.
It’s not quite there yet. “I’m still working on it. It’s not sour enough, and it must be more maasim [sour], you know?” Ferdinand “Budgie” Montoya admits, a tad ruefully, that he doesn’t speak Tagalog. But truth is, judging from the menu of his restaurant Sarap, he does. Fluently. Because as every Filipino knows, our language is food.
“I don’t need to speak the language to know how to cook it,” he says. “You know, there’s a food language and a food that people understand in the kitchen.” And Sarap certainly understands this.
Born in Davao, raised in
