Hot Spanish Food In Breezy Tagaytay
By Lynette A. Villariba
IN THE CASTILLAN setting he created in Las Brisas de Tagaytay, Carlos Callejo looks more like the man from La Mancha than a Spanish-Filipino restaurateur. That is because he had just emerged triumphant from a quixotic battle with liver cancer.
Callejo survived the death sentence he got from his doctors who diagnosed him with the disease in 1999. His weapons? A positive outlook, the power of faith combined with neo-medicine.
He gives credit to his modern-day Dulcinea, the former Malou Pabalan, who stayed with him through thick and thin for 25 years, encouraged him to fight and "showed the way back to God."
In thanksgiving, aside from performing apostolic work for patients in the same situation, the reformed Catholic put up Restaurante Carlos as a tribute to his wife's excellent cooking, which nourished him back to health. Malou Callejo truly showed that the way to a man's heart-and health-is through his stomach.
Malou honed her culinary talents in the Castillan tradition of gathering for Sunday meals, perfecting the Spanish cocido -- a mix of chicken, pork and beef cooked in chorizo. She acknowledges the influence of her maternal grandmother, Lolita Tronqued-Fronstroller, whose cocido, paella and relleno are the family's benchmark for perfect Spanish cooking.
Now Malou offers the home cooking her family loves to Tagaytay visitors.
She plans the menu for the recently opened restaurant (tel. 0917-9514393), helping customize an excellent Spanish dinner for two or a feast for a traveling group of up to 60. She picks only the freshest ingredients from nearby organic farms and uses extra virgin olive oil from Iberian orchards. She also bakes her own must-have cheesecake for dessert, a just-right delight even for the diet-conscious.
Restaurante Carlos sits in the middle of a villas-for-rent compound aptly named Las Brisas de Tagaytay just off the Mendez crossing. The place, which is also home to the Callejo couple, offers bed-and-breakfast facilities for transients (call +63 46-4131132 or fax +63 46-4131130).
The Callejos had taken a long journey from Bilbao, Spain, where they originated, to Bacolod, where Carlos grew up, to Alabang where he lived it up, to American hospitals, after his illness was diagnosed.
Now they have settled down amid the breezy hills of Tagaytay to heal and defy the doctors' forecasts.
Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer, March 18, 2004, page D2.