At Baguio Mountain Man, Forget Fancy and Expect Amazing
Baguio City—To get to Mountain Man here, diners need to pass a narrow street with parked cars on either side, look for the house beside the lamppost, and climb up three stories to a partially covered, open-air roof deck. There they will be welcomed by the husband-and-wife team of Chavi and Millie Romawac, and, if you’re lucky, their nine-year-old son Araw and their faithful pooch Aioli will say hello, too.
The dining table at Mountain Man
The unexpected dining space with a thoughtfully laid-out table, warm lighting, and the friendly smiles of Chef Chavi and Millie will do wonders to ease travel fatigue, especially if you’ve come straight from Manila and had to go through pouring rain that threatened to morph into a cascading river just as you’re negotiating the twists and turns of Marcos Highway. Like we did. Suddenly the nasty weather didn’t feel so bad, and my friends and I were ready to settle in and experience what the Mountain Man had to offer.
Before we sat down, Millie led the group in an informal ritual to involve the spirits and offer thanks for the meal ahead. She brought out a bottle of tapuy, a type of fermented rice wine, and distributed small cups to the attendees for a quick toast, leaving one cup on the altar dedicated to the anitos or spirits and deities of the region.
Millie preps the appetizer, Voltaire's Victuals
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“We’re not a restaurant,” Chef Chavi says when he finds a second to pause and chat while busy prepping our meal in the open kitchen. “Are we?” he adds, seemingly unsure of himself. In the context of a commercial establishment serving food to paying customers, Baguio Mountain Man is technically a restaurant, but the term seems reductive when applied to what the couple is doing here. It’s a private dining space open by reservation only to a limited number of guests, for which they serve their version of regional cuisine. The experience is personalized, meaning the chef and his team take great pains to try and get to know their diners.
Mountain Man uses locally sourced utensils, plates, and serving dishes
In our group’s case, our names showed up in the actual dishes served during the meal. Voltaire’s Victuals was a piece of homebaked Danish topped with smoked pork, Kiangan-inspired Hinanglag flakes with grilled bell pepper spread, onion jam, apple, and watercress, while PJ’s Passion (named after this writer, I assumed) was the bread course, which was two servings of multigrain bread served with a creamy spread comprised of a variety of cheeses, local mushroom, and an infusion of truffle. Coming from a nearly six-hour-long drive, we were famished, and the bread was gone in minutes.
Salad Salazar was a mix of greens, sliced fruits, meat, and grilled mushrooms, drizzled with a passionfruit and tapuy dressing. It was served and tossed in wooden bowls sourced from local craftsmen, as was most of the other tools, utensils, and other knickknacks in the dining space.
Voltaire's Victuals is homebaked Danish topped with smoked pork, Kiangan-inspired Hinanglag flakes with grilled bell pepper spread, onion jam, apple, and watercress
Suddenly, Chef Chavi brought out what looked like a gangsa (a traditional Ifugao percussive instrument), started lightly tapping on it to create a lively beat while his son Araw unfurled his arms, bent his body and swayed in time to the rhythm. Father and son made one turn around the table then stopped at the head, where the chef officially welcomed his diners to their abode. With Millie by his side, the Mountain Man himself—once a musician who played guitar for reggae-ska-pop band Session Road—told us the story of his roof deck kitchen and how he found his calling not just as a chef but as a free spirit devoted to welcoming guests into his home and his heart.
The Baguio native said he grew up acutely aware of the region’s customs and traditions and how food was a connector not just within the home but across cultures and communities. At the height of the pandemic, he and Millie participated in a food mapping exercise across the Cordilleras that brought him to the mountains of Kiangan, Ifugao.
The bread course is named PJ's Passion
“We went there to cook for a community of 15,” he said. “Umuulan buong araw. Pagdating ng 4 p.m., we were supposed to serve lunch, tumigil yung ulan. Literally, bumukas yung langit. For us, that was a sign. Bakit kami dinala sa lugar na yun? Eventually we realized that that was going to be our mission in life as a family.”
From there, things seemed to naturally fall into place. In late 2021, the roof deck in the family home provided the space for the family to open Mountain Man, where Chef Chavi, Millie, and their small team of helpers are able to share what they call “Cordillera gastronomy.”
“These are our interpretations of (traditional) dishes, the way we saw them being done, and some dishes that we discovered along the way when we were camping across the region,” he said.
One by one, Chef Chavi presented the dishes steaming on the table to the left, where diners are invited to help themselves, buffet-style. Inside a palayok is what in our menu was called the Baltazar Baguio Chicken Rice dish (all the dishes were named after the individuals in our nine-person group), which is a chicken soup that bears a resemblance to traditional tinola and the region’s pinikpikan (“Minus the violence,” the chef was quick to add). The soup is enriched with torched chicken and etag, or salted pork, and is supposed to be eaten with Balatinaw rice, which is a local glutinous rice consumed across Mountain Province and the surrounding region. The chef says that this version is mixed with Japanese rice “for balance.”
The Mountain Man Chef Chavi working on the seafood
I poured a ladle-full of steaming soup into my bowl and took a sip. It was hearty and comforting, exactly what you would imagine having on a cold Baguio evening while incessant rains pitter-pattered outside.
A slow-cooked pork belly dish (Madel’s Magic: Kiangan-inspired Hinangdag) is from a dish the couple encountered in Kiangan, Ifugao where the meat is cooked in its own fat for three hours. The Chef Chavi version is finished with garlic. The vegetable dish, or Branden’s Bounty, is comprised of salingit or what Chef Chavi says are sweet-tasting greens similar to Brussels sprouts that grow around cabbages and cooked with oyster mushrooms and sabeng, or fermented rice and corn from the town of Bauko in Mountain Province. That was the first thing wiped out from my plate, and when I snuck a glance at the table to get more, I discovered it had already disappeared.
Millie prepares the dessert, Laced with Love
The seafood dish was Lardizabal’s Clambake, which is a variety of seafood (clams, mussels, prawns, and crabs) cooked with lemongrass and watercress in a pot on an open fire pit that the couple set up in another side of the roof deck. We were free to approach the pot and use tongs to fill our plate with as much seafood as we could finish. Carbonell’s Catch, meanwhile, was a salt-encrusted pompano fish baked in the open fire. It was tender, juicy, and tasted of the sea, even way out here in the mountains hundreds of kilometers from the nearest ocean.
As a Filipino table, the spread wasn’t complete without some sort of sawsawan. Mountain Man had three that took whatever we mixed them with to a whole ‘nother level: there was a special ginger sauce, a crunchy spicy garlic sauce, and a third one with dill, capers, parsley and garlic that worked well with the chicken, the seafood, and the fish.
Dessert was Laced with Love, a homemade yogurt mixed with warm fire-grilled strawberries, peaches, candied sundried tomatoes, honey glaze and mint. It wasn’t on the menu, but Millie brought out a Brazo de Mercedes cake that was lighter than air and tasted sublime. She also brought out a pot of salabat or ginger tea, which we quietly sipped as Chef Chavi and Millie joined us in the table for some after-dinner chit chat. We talked about Chavi’s days rocking out with a band that got fairly big in its heyday, common friends they had with our group, and celebrities and huge personalities that have made the trek up the city and the third floor to dine at that very table we were sitting in.
Millie, Araw, and Chavi Romawac pose with the day's catch
It was at that moment that I realized that the dinner transcended any sort of expectations I had about a rainy, Friday night meal in the City of Pines. I had visited Baguio many times in the past, but never had a meal quite as memorable as the one I just had. Even some of the upscale, five-star meals I’ve had the fortune of having as part of my duties as a lifestyle journalist—in Michelin-starred restaurants in some of the world’s culinary capitals—suddenly paled in comparison to a relatively humble but no less exquisite repast prepared by a dedicated team using fresh, locally sourced ingredients and in the company of close friends.
In the lifelong search for the best meal in the world, I wasn’t looking for fancy, I was looking for amazing and I certainly found it at the rooftop kitchen of Baguio’s Mountain Man.
For inquiries and reservations, message Baguio Mountain Man on Facebook. John Hay Hotels also offer the Baguio Mountain Man experience every Saturday for P4,000 per head.
