Vegetables take center stage in Westin Manila’s culinary series
For the latest iteration of Westin Manila’s Cuiscene culinary series, executive chef Rej Casanova invites Chinoy chef Sharwin Tee to heat up the woks of Westin Manila’s Seasonal Tastes for a vegetable pairing dinner.
Cuiscene is Westin Manila’s culinary series where executive chef Rej Casanova invites guest chefs to share the kitchen to bring new flavors and techniques. For the last one, Casanova partnered with Mimi Vergara-Tupas and her son, Chef Uno Tupas from Made Simple and Clean Kitchen of Davao to showcase plant-based ingredients.
For this latest collaboration, the farmers and their vegetables are again the focus. The hotel teamed up with the Agribusiness and Countryside Development Foundation (ABCDF) to directly link it to farmers and increase value all throughout the chain. The end user gets a better deal by removing all sorts of extraneous fees and the farmer gets to take home more money making this a more sustainable venture supporting the foundation’s push for job creation in the countryside.
“The Agribusiness and Countryside Development Foundation is dedicated to linking farmers and agribusiness owners and practitioners to people who can support them,” explained Yvette Tan, a journalist and board member of the foundation. “If a regular Filipino wants to help a regular Filipino farmer... buy local, or if possible buy straight from farmers or patronize restaurants that you know support local farmers.”
What better way to showcase this partnership than featuring the vegetables in an eight-course Chinese feast. For this, Casanova invited Chinoy chef Sharwin Tee to heat up the woks of Westin Manila’s Seasonal Tastes for a vegetable pairing dinner. Each entrée would feature a vegetable and a protein.
With this dinner, the highlights are really the two chefs’ creative interpretations of tried-and-true favorites from a Chinese restaurant menu. The menu is a contrast of styles between the two chefs. Casanova takes a more adventurous, modern take occasionally putting in premium western ingredients, while Tee goes for more traditional flavors, often weaving stories of eating this food at home with his family when he was growing up.
Cuiscene No. 2 will run for two nights on January 31 and February 7 at Seasonal Tastes at the Westin Manila. Each seat is priced at P4,800 nett.