Chef Kevin David of Restaurant Idalia: 'We just make good food'

It all began with freshly-made pasta, which he relished during a family trip to Italy when he was a teenager.

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Chef Kevin David, like most Filipinos, grew up on pasta from the box, boiled and topped with sweet pomodoro.

“Pasta was the reason I became a chef,” says the 6-ft.-4-in. tall Kevin, the executive chef of Restaurant Idalia on Valero St. in Salcedo Village. “When I first travelled to Europe, I had fresh pasta for the first time. It kind of blew my mind, changed everything, changed my perspective about, I guess, pasta or noodles.”

You could say the unfurling of the road to Restaurant Idalia began with the unfurling of the tagliarelle (a long, flat, Italian noodle similar to fettuccine but narrower) in the Frutti di Mare that he ordered.

“I never had anything like that in my life. I was used to eating, you know, the overcooked spaghetti with the Filipino Bolognese. The sweet one.”

Then after he had the fresh pasta, there was no turning back for Kevin, the firstborn of pilot Capt. Reg David and his wife Shan Dioquino-David.

“I realized I didn’t like the pasta I was used to. I was eating it out of sustenance,” he confesses now.

After learning how to make fresh pasta, he doesn’t eat pasta for sustenance anymore. For what? “Pleasure,” he answers in a heartbeat.

At Restaurant Idalia, they make pasta out of sourdough. “We do a lot of fresh pasta. I’ve always appreciated how something so simple could be something so delicious. I think I’ve been tied to fresh pasta ever since I started my career as a young cook.”

That fresh-pasta moment in Europe (he wasn’t sure if it was in Rome or Santorini) made him realize later on that if he wanted to eat the kind of food he only gets to taste in restaurants abroad without burning a hole in his pocket, he had to don an apron and cook it himself. As soon as he returned home to the Philippines, he started watching the Food Network, reading more food books and started going more often to the supermarket, familiarizing himself with fruits and vegetables.