KHAIBA POP-UP AT BALMORI SUITES CHEF'S TABLE

Khaiba is the newest pop-up at Balmori Suites Chef's Table, Rockwell Power Plant Mall. I would best describe the food to be a marriage of Filipino ingredients and flavors, expressed with a twist from the Middle East. Featured chefs of this pop-up are Sonny Mariano and Nouel Catis.

- KARLA REYES

It was my first time meeting chef Sonny Mariano, one of the corporate chefs of the Tasteless Food Group. According to chef Sonny, he merely cooked everything he liked to eat or at least similar to it, but different. A pastry chef by training, he took on the reins for the pop-up. Cool, calm and collected, he showed no inkling of stress or worry, at least from the guests' point of view.

For starters, he served us a dish called alimasag at kalabasa, squash puree piped into a crispy rolled wafer or barquillos, topped with a crab salad. Next item was the jamon at pandesal, a fried doughnut hole-sized pandesal stuffed with daqoos or a garlic tomato sauce topped with jamon. I'm usually a sinigang purist and would prefer a traditional sinigang—our family version that has been served since my childhood, sans the fusion—but this turned out to be one of my favorite dishes. The sinigang flavors came through in the form of a prune and tamarind glaze basted on to the USDA beef belly cubes on a skewer. I must have had three skewers that evening, which was already a whole order in itself.