The Margarita I Knew
She was always the Margarita Forés to me. Even when I was a student, I knew of her. The woman behind CIBO. I remember seeing her posters, in a white shirt, pearls, pasta all over. Of course, back then, I only knew her as the woman behind a terrific restaurant. My teenage palate never thought she would be the juggernaut that would elevate Philippine gastronomy. Back then, I never even expected to ever meet her.
My official initiation to Margarita Forés was a big one. As a food writer, I’d met her in passing several times, but out of nowhere, I received an invite to a mysterious event in Lusso, her premium café in Greenbelt. No one knew why we were there, but everyone knows you never pass on an invite to any Forés establishment.
That was the day the panel behind Asia's 50 Best Restaurants selected her as the Best Female Chef in Asia 2016. She arrived still shrouded in the euphoria of having found out a few hours earlier. We were all given 10 minutes each with her and she could barely compose her answers from the excitement. This woman, who had been cooking since the early ’90s and introducing concepts and ideas the general public wasn’t aware of, was in such humble disbelief that the first thing she asked after they told her she’d won was if they were going to take it away.
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“Not in my wildest dreams!” she kept reiterating. “I didn’t realize that we are really on the radar now.” Once the adrenaline subsided, she got down to business. “I will promote Filipino cuisine because it's a cause that needs to be shouted out a bit louder…Our time is now. It's the time of the Filipino chef. A Filipina chef!”
So much has been said about how successfully she was able to do that before and after she became the Best Female Chef. But while she went from strength to strength in terms of her work, she remained that unassuming woman who just wanted to feed people to make them happy.
There was no debate when I got engaged that Margarita was going to cater our wedding. We even adjusted the date to when Whitespace (where her commissary was) was available. At this point, I was under no impression that the incumbent Best Female Chef would be hands-on in our planning. I trusted that her insistence on quality stood whether she was there or not. So, when I got the message that our tasting would be set on a particular day when Margarita was available, I was surprised but delighted. Her reputation for being very involved in everything she does was always bandied about, but I didn’t think it extended to a small-ish event involving a random journalist. There were no critics or world leaders to impress—just family and friends.
She was there on the dot, giving suggestions on place settings and waiters’ outfits. There was no rebuff to any of the changes we requested. She noted all our comments—from the viscosity of the soup to the sizes of the fish. I told her our dream was to have a taco bar for cocktails, and she set about making it come true. She gestured at her assistant saying, “Remember, Jorge (Mendez, her R&D chef) made these delicious squid-ink tacos?” She even reminded me to invite our priest to the reception, an idea that didn’t even cross my mind.
The morning before our wedding, she sent me a photo of the name cards she had meticulously written in calligraphy, a Cibo di M signature. By midnight, I wrote a half-panicked message to the team that I forgot to put a setting for one of our ninongs. “No worries,” she said. Then and there, she crafted a new card and rearranged the seating.
A little over a year later, I had the tremendous opportunity to interview her extensively for a project. We would meet monthly when she would regale me with the most colorful stories about her life: her languid childhood in Bahay na Puti, their ancestral home in Cubao; the lavish Ilonggo-style meals with maliputo, kaliskis empanada, and puto Manapla overseen by her grandmother Ester; afternoons at The Peninsula in Hong Kong with her grandfather, legendary tycoon J. Amado Araneta.
In those days, we would meet mostly in one of her restaurants—Grace Park, in particular—or some of her local favorites, like Shang Palace. She would take me through her cold winters of Mount Holyoke (“I gained so many pounds!”); how she, mentioning it with the good humor that comes with hindsight, dropped out of college in the US for love (“My mom was so pissed!”); and her time as a young Accounting graduate suddenly working the finance floor in Hong Kong (“I could only afford cheap employee lunches and stuff from convenience stores!”).
She was a bon vivant as well as a gourmet. In between the tales, she would order: new items she was testing, old items she can’t get enough of, stuff she wanted us to try. She once fed me a spoonful of batitis and told me how versatile it was for highlighting a dish’s seafood flavor. It tasted weird but I didn’t tell her. She took us to her son Amado’s soon-to-open restaurant (the eventual a mano) at 9 p.m. and fed us pizza.
That Christmas, she gave me a present and the card read—in her signature handwriting, of course— For Sasha, Jason (my husband whom she hasn’t seen since the wedding), and Luca (my son whom she’d only heard me talk about occasionally).
It was always a joy to see her, not because she remembered the tiniest details or that she always came bearing food. It was just so much fun to see so much life coming out of a tiny woman. (She was very petite, although her aura never made her seem so.) She lived so well that, even without her culinary skills or her business acumen, her vitality alone was contagious.
Last night, after confirmation that suddenly all her verve and energy were cut short, a friend messaged me, saying that he will never forget the laing soup that Margarita served at our wedding. It’s been eight years.
Margarita has made too many contributions, not just to the culinary world but to this country. No doubt so many people will remember those achievements, from the unforgettable spinach dip that remains a CIBO bestseller to her Order of the Star of Italy. But like her, I’ll remember the smaller details. How she never forgot her clients’ names, how she moved her schedule to accommodate her couples, the free champagne she gave us for our first toast as husband and wife, the efficient assurance that our ninong will never realize we forgot to give him a seat at our reception. It's her inadvertent impact, the stories she’s told and the memories she’s sparked, that will truly endure.
