After trying out Netong’s – a Lapaz batchoy place I hadn’t heard of until yesterday – I moved on to Deco’s, at the public market in Lapaz. Location-wise, that was as authentic as you could get. The fact that it was practically next door to a stall that sold oysters by the basin was a particularly nice touch.
I was there to try the batchoy tho, so no mollusc was going to distract me. And anyway, I was eager to see if this Deco’s was as sweet as people had said – and as I remembered from the Deco’s that used to be at Southgate Mall, across from Mantrade along Edsa.
To my surprise, it wasn’t, although I really shouldn’t have been. Anyone who’s seen a Deco’s logo in recent memory will immediately see the difference between the sign outside the eatery I was in, and the yellow and brown design carried by franchised Deco’s restaurants nowadays. And franchise restaurants rarely match the original. Try Casa Armas in Malate, versus the one in Greenbelt, for example.
Anyway, as I said, the Deco’s that I used to go to in Manila was sweet – a flaw which I overcame with an irresponsible amount of black pepper. The one I had at the public market yesterday however, was nothing of the sort. In fact, I went through that bowl, exactly as it was set down in front of me, until the very end when I’d realised I’d skipped the pepper.
At some point in its business past, Deco’s had split down two roads: the one to commercialisation, which ended up in big franchise restaurants using the brown and yellow logo; and the one that remained small and true to its roots. In the process, the commercialized batchoy underwent a transformation that made it more mainstream, while the original kept pretty much to the old fomula. I call it the Empire Effect – where local delicacies are altered to suit the tastes of the consumers in the ‘imperial’ center.
The Deco’s batchoy I had – close as it was to the local original – checked off all the right boxes. The broth to stuff ratio was good; the broth was as rich and subtle as I remembered; the panakot – beef lashings, pork strips, and all that – was fresh and in generous enough quantities; and it looked exactly like a batchoy should look.
Netong’s was good too, yes. But for my money, what it actually is is a good compromise between authenticity and commercialization, i.e., a jazzed-up version of the original, designed to appeal to a market whose palate has been spoiled by easy access to all sorts of modern cuisine. It certainly looked the part.
The Deco’s I had, on the other hand, was how I remembered batchoy from when I was a kid growing up in Iloilo – kinda like a legacy dish which, as the sign outside the joint said, gave you a taste of Ilonggo history.
15 November 2017
