Tandem Manila Puts Its Best Dishes on a Mixtape and Calls It Memories

It is a remarkable feat for such a young, eclectic fine dining restaurant in the heart of Makati to have already racked up a catalog of tasting menus with a whole lot of thought and enough nostalgia infused within them to keep making us scratch our heads in bewilderment.

Tandem Manila in Makati City invited Esquire Philippines to take a stab at their latest "Memories" tasting menu. The best way to put it is a lot like an artist's greatest hits compilation album that is a thrill ride of their most popular dishes that are rooted in memories in some shape or form.

ALSO READ:

Tandem Manila Gives You Permission to Sin

At New Makati Restaurant Tandem, Focus Is on Themes Instead of Cuisines

While we understand the need for homages to different cuisines you were classically trained in or the different capital cities where you worked your fingers to the bone while on a quest to perfect particular dishes, Tandem sets itself apart via their liberal instrumentation of even the most taboo themes, such as the seven deadly sins, for their thematic menus.

That was our opening salvo to Tandem and was a masterclass in gastronomic storytelling we had yet to experience.

Memories opens the way any good compilation does, with a run of singles, in this case three snacks drawn from three different past menus and handed over before we had properly settled into our chairs. Re, from Music, takes its cue from the golden sun lyric in Do-Re-Mi and arrives as an egg yolk gel crowning a tuile cone of truffle mushroom, capped with pickled mushroom and spring onion, all of it eaten in a single bite, which seems to us a rather brisk way to treat a Rodgers and Hammerstein reference.

Eggplant, from Tandem’s maiden menu, Top Crops of the Philippines, sandwiches red bell pepper eggplant puree and charred eggplant puree in a lavash with gremolata and eggplant ash on top, a snack that was always meant to show that fine dining does not depend on expensive ingredients and that still makes a fairly convincing case three years on. Excitement, from Emotions, is a kimchi and sweet potato croquette with gochujang aioli, built around the patience fermentation demands and the anticipation of waiting on it, which is an apt thing to serve a table that has already waited weeks for its reservation.

Re from Tandem's Music Menu

Potato from Top Crops of the Philippines (Tandem's Maiden Menu)

The first proper course is Potato, also from Top Crops, a mussel salad coated in its own juice with preserved limes, ikura, and dill oil, topped with a potato dashi espuma and served with a potato chicharron made from the water the potatoes were boiled in, so that the root supplies both the foam and the crunch and the kitchen for maximum resourcefulness.

Tomato, from the same menu, follows as a tartare in smoked olive oil with basil and kesong puti, accompanied by pesto, an apple balsamic glaze, and a watermelon granita, and by Chefs Mikee and Alex Tan's own account, swivels their heads to more sentimental matters.

The next dish, which is quite understandably our undeniable favorite from the menu, is Sloth from the aforementioned and provocative Seven Deadly Sins menu.

Tandem refined the dish with the meaty surprise in the middle with caramelized onion cappelletti with braised beef, nutritional yeast breadcrumbs, and Gruyere, finished with a burnt onion espuma made from the kitchen’s own onion scraps and reimagined by the chefs as comfort and patience.

Fear, from Emotions, goes back to Alex and Mikee’s older personal fears and returns as a modern take built on anchovy butter, a flavor that has since become a Tandem favorite, paired with smoked brown butter and a buckwheat sourdough. This is definitely a frighteningly rustically flavored carb portion of a menu.

Tomato from Top Crops

Next up was from the Rice Is Life menu, Steeped. This consists of popping brown rice steeped with kombu and mushrooms into a broth and pouring it over a lapu-lapu roulade of tobiko and spring onion wrapped in pechay, all of it resting on grilled XO fried rice.

Another stellar pick from us from the Greatest Hits menu is Homesick from Emotions.

The flavors are very nostalgic, as the name suggests, compelling us to picture a young Ego from Ratatatouille being transported back to his childhood. This dish draws on the flavors Alex missed while studying and working abroad: a pan-seared duck breast with adobo pineapple sauce, squash puree, squash pavé, pickled squash, and duck fat confit onion, with the squash arriving in three separate forms, a fixation any homesick person will recognize.

Comfort, also from Emotions, comes from the childhood dishes Mikee’s mother made whenever her daughter was feeling down: here an adlai caldo with sautéed mushroom and kangkong alongside roast pork belly in a sinigang glaze and textures of chicharron, fried onion, and fried kangkong leaf, a dish that once consoled a single child now also reset my own taste buds as we closed out the meal.

Pineapple, the fourth and final appearance by Top Crops, serves as the palate cleanser, a pineapple sorbet with a coconut film and flowers, and it clears the way for Frozen, from Rice is Life, in which horchata is smoked, churned, and frozen into ice cream and surrounded by cinnamon streusel, milk cardamom mochi, sago in mint lime syrup, mango and berry leather, and a chocolate tuile, a considerable supporting cast for one scoop.

The compilation mixtape of sorts closes with a second set of three snacks to mirror the first. Fermented, from Rice is Life, is a tartlet of lime curd, fermented rice jelly, and lychee chantilly. Sadness, from Emotions, began as ice cream on the premise that one eats ice cream when sad and returns as a cream puff with strawberry gel and chai pastry cream, a revised memory that demonstrates the fallibility the chefs set out to explore, only in pastry form. Joy, also from Emotions, is a chocolate bonbon of ganache and fennel seed, inspired by the chefs’ simple belief that chocolate makes everything happier.

The folks at Tandem Manila really have a metaphorical special sauce in every menu they've put out so far, and we just hope they don't lose their esoteric tastes and ideas rattling in their noggins anytime soon.

The closing tracks of the compilation record at Tandem Manila

READ MORE:

Tandem Manila Gives You Permission to Sin

At New Makati Restaurant Tandem, Focus Is on Themes Instead of Cuisines