CLAUDE TAYAG

If you didn’t know the address, you might miss the sign. In a quiet residential subdivision in Angeles City, behind nondescript walls, lies Balé Dutung (House of Wood)—the home, art gallery and restaurant of celebrated chef, artist and furniture designer Claudio “Claude” Tayag and his wife Mary Ann Quioc Tayag. 

In the past 24 years, it has become a culinary and heritage destination as the space has undergone changes through the years. Mostly made up of wood, Balé Dutung was a pioneer in degustation “private dining,” offering a tasting menu or a series of dishes cooked by Claude to provide a unique culinary experience through various flavors and courses.  

 Claude not only cooks for diners at Balé Dutung but interacts with them as well—not just to introduce the dishes but to give you a history lesson on Filipino cuisine and the arts. He can’t help it. Once you ask a question and get him talking on a particular subject, you’d better reschedule your next appointment. 

The chef and artist is an expert on heritage food, art, furniture design and food writing with an arsenal of amazing stories about food, artists, restaurateurs, celebrities he’s met, places he’s been to, and most of all, he will talk about our beloved most popular (national) dish adobo. But more on that later. 

How did this man who never wandered far from his mother’s kitchen get to be such a walking encyclopedia of knowledge; how can enormous talent in diverse disciplines reside in one man? Well, he followed his heart. And it’s led him to many places, people, disciplines, passions, and to the love of his life. 

If Claude’s life were condensed into a physical thing, it would be Balé Dutung. Walking through this space is like walking through the many phases of his life—all of them ongoing, all of them overlapping. The Kapampangan in him informs Claude the artist, the chef, the restaurateur and the furniture designer, and vice versa. 

If Claude had not followed his heart, he would probably be working somewhere as part of a think tank or maybe even as an economist at the United Nations. Claude graduated from the University of the Philippines (UP) with a degree in economics, but he started out at the College of Architecture. 

Architecture was the compromise course nearest to what he really wanted to study: Fine Arts. His parents said there was no money in art so they urged him to take up architecture instead. 

If there were two people that led him to become a chef and an artist, it’s his parents. His father Renato “Katoks” D. Tayag was a journalist for The Manila Times. He was friends with artists and writers that would not only influence Claude but would take him under their wing, including Emilio “Abe” Aguilar Cruz, Katoks’ bossom buddy since Pampanga High School in 1933. His mother, Adoracion Suarez, bore 12 children, all of them spoiled with good food at home. 

HOUSE OF WOOD

Claude Tayag wears many hats and all of them are figuratively on display at Balé Dutung. Right at the entrance is a garden with his sculptures inspired by Filipino mythological creatures like the tikbalang. The pond is surrounded by bamboo, trees and plants that must have taken many years to grow and become this lush. 

Somewhere—anywhere—in this space, as you make your way to the outdoor dining room with a long wooden table, you will see his works: a wavy bench he designed in the 1990s; a wooden vase in the shape of a temaki sushi; a letter holder that’s like a worm; a huge watercolor painting; more sculptures and more paintings. 

There are also pictures on one wall. The one that catches your eye is of Claude with the late, beloved Anthony Bourdain. When Bourdain took his TV show No Reservations to the Philippines, Claude was his guide to the Philippines’ Culinary Heartland.

Both Bourdain and Claude haven’t met a cricket or animal they didn’t want to eat. Claude took him to Mila’s Carinderia for papaitan (a soup made of the goat’s entrails including its bile) and kaldereta and sinigang na kambing (goat), Aling Lucing’s Sisig, and of course Balé Dutung, where Claude served him the best of Kapampangan dishes, including seafood kare-kare, sinigang na bangus sa bayabas, and pakô salad in the 10-course tasting menu. 

There are also pictures on one wall. The one that catches your eye is of Claude with the late, beloved Anthony Bourdain. When Bourdain took his TV show No Reservations to the Philippines, Claude was his guide to the Philippines’ Culinary Heartland.

Both Bourdain and Claude haven’t met a cricket or animal they didn’t want to eat. Claude took him to Arlyns Carinderia for papaitan (soup made of animal entrails) and kambing (goat), Aling Lucing’s Sisig, and of course Bale Dutung, where Claude served him the best of Kapampangan dishes, including seafood kare-kare, sinigang sa bayos, and pako salad in the 10-course tasting menu. REPEAT.

A LEGACY TO LEAVE ALL FILIPINOS

When Claude followed his heart to cooking, he never thought he’d end up where he is today: a chef, a researcher, a culinary champion, and a food writer. “Chef” is a title he’s not very comfortable with because, he says, he never went to a formal culinary school. 

Well, he never went to art school either, but he’s one of the country’s best living artists today. When Filipinos are arguing about adobo, they want to hear what Claude has to say. The simple, go-to adobo that we all want to come home to caused national controversy in 2021. When the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) proposed to standardize the adobo recipe, chefs, cooks, homemakers, karinderia owners and everyone that has ever cooked adobo reacted strongly—in newspapers, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok. 

It was a glorious, beautiful mess! 

It was only then that we knew just how much people were passionate about adobo. Claude wrote a column about it, titled “The Adobo Riot: Much ado about nothing,” quoting reactions from chefs, culinary experts and netizens.  

Claude might not have let it rip in his column, but being the overachiever that he is, he wrote a book about it! Hailed by many as the definitive book on adobo, The Ultimate Filipino Adobo: Stories Through the Ages, was published by the Foreign Service Institute in 2022; and edited by Michaela Fenix with Guillermo "Ige" Ramos as creative director. 

He won’t say it, of course, but we think this book is part of Claude Tayag’s legacy in our culinary heritage. It is a painstaking work born from research, stories and recipes from chefs and cooks from the Philippines and Filipinos abroad. Claude tells their stories and so adobo as they cook it becomes part of their history and ours. 

The book features adobo of the current times as well as pre-Hispanic adobos. Today, we enjoy adobong baboy, chicken and pork adobo sa toyo, adobo sa atsuete, adobong sa puti (with vinegar only, absence of soy sauce), adobo sa dilaw (with yellow ginger or turmeric), and adobo sa gata (with coconut milk), among many others. 

In pre-Hispanic times, they had Ilocano dinaldalem (pig’s liver) and igado (pork tenderloin with innards of liver, kidney, heart and spleen, along with carrots, green peas, potatoes and chickpeas), Kapampangan kilayin (a mixture of pork kasim, liver, and lungs, soaked in vinegar and then simmered until it dries up), and Tagalog paksiw na bangus, Cebuano inun-unan nga isda (like Tagalog paksiw na bangus but less acidic), Iloilo pinamalhan (literally reduction of vinegar) and many more. 

A RESTAURANT SLASH ART GALLERY

The 2,000 sqm. Bale Dutung has two restaurants. One is the private dining space inside, and more recently is the restaurant out front with the entrance on Paul Avenue that’s open every day. 

Balé Dutung the restaurant feels like a gallery space exhibiting a retrospective of Claude Tayag’s body of works. On the walls are his series of folk santos and moriones paintings hanging on the walls. The dining space also overlooks the open kitchen and the retail space where you could get his book and bottles of condiments and preserved food. 

Over lunch of traditional Kapampangan and Filipino dishes, Claude talks about the beginnings of The Ultimate Filipino Adobo. “My first article was The Adobo Riot, which got a lot of comments. It literally had a life of its own. I wrote about 16 adobo articles in a span of more than a year. At the end of the year, I interviewed my main source, food historian Felice Sta. Maria. I asked her about the earliest mention of Filipino adobo in locally published cookbooks. She said it was 1914, 1916, 1918 one by one, until Nora Dasa's Let's Cook with Nora in 1965.” 

Claude says that our adobo is more of the cooking method using vinegar as the dish’s primary source of liquid. The Spanish adobo, where we may have borrowed the term from, is a marinade to preserve whatever protein—meat or fish—for future cooking. According to Felice, through her research, the Filipino adobo is a way of cooking using vinegar as the primary source of liquid. Then the aromatics, meaning garlic, onion, pepper, bay leaf, even turmeric, achuete, or gata depending on the cook. 

“It varies according to the region, according to the household. We have adobong manok, adobong baboy, whatever protein you choose. Plus, three kinds of flavorings or seasonings: salt; patis (fish sauce, and toyo or soy sauce we got from the Chinese. 

“In the coastal towns of Malabon and Navotas, Bulacan, because they're manufacturers of fish sauce, that is their flavoring. So, each has its own flavor. The other one is bagoong or shrimp paste. But the thing is, there's still vinegar. We have so many variants. In my book, I discuss that I've read somewhere, some Filipino writers have written that the original Filipino Adobo may have been lost in history, which I beg to disagree.” 

But we have, however, the adobos of some of our best chefs today, like chef Sunshine Puey’s lamb ribs adobo; chef Sau del Rosario’s duck adobo confit; chef Myke “Tatung” Sarthou’s adobo Bisaya, and chef Theodore Day Salonga’s adobong kalabaw at papaya sa gata. 

“So many variations,” Claude says. “In Pampanga we have arobung ema (mud crab adobo), adobong kamaru (mole crickets), and adobong tugak (frog); Cebu has adobong pina-uga (crispy dry pork belly adobo), there’s also adobong balut (unhatched duck embryo).” 

Claude’s The Ultimate Filipino Adobo proves definitively—to the government and everyone—that our adobo just cannot be standardized.

BOLD, GAME-CHANGING DECISIONS

Claude was in his early 40s when he got married. When we ask him of his boldest decisions in life, he says it was marrying Mary Ann Quioc Tayag. She was the gamechanger in his life. 

As a bachelor, he was linked to several women, but his romances were never really high-profile despite his being one of the most eligible single men around. Little did he know that he had already met his future wife when they were in elementary school. Mary Ann was a friend and classmate of his younger sister, and Claude was batchmates with her older brothers. 

He says, “Yung dati palibot-libot, pa ganun-ganun lang ako then bigla akong nag-settle down. Literally, settle down here in Balé Dutung,” he says. 

They got married in 1998 and celebrated their 25th anniversary last year. Claude followed his heart to Hong Kong, where Mary Ann was living at the time. A former flight attendant and trainer at Cathay Pacific, she was a widow with a young son when they began dating. 

“Nico's biological father died when he was just two years old,” Claude says. “Mary Ann never dated. She lived in Hong Kong for 18 years.” 

Unlike many of her fellow flight attendants, Mary Ann didn’t like dating foreigners. “Ayaw nila para sa akin “adobo” (meaning Filipino), “steak” naman daw, she says with a big laugh. “Eh, di lang adobo gusto ko, dapat burong talangka!” (I had my mind set not just on any Filipino but a fellow Kapampangan at that.)

The couple raised their son Nico together, and survived Mary Ann’s illness together too. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she told her husband and son to “not call it a cancer but rather a journey. It has a start and an end.” 

Indeed the journey had an end. Mary Ann had surgery and finished her chemo treatments in 2017. During those times, she healed in Balé Dutung. 

“You really cannot plan your life or career,” Claude says. “Just follow your heart and it will lead you to wherever you are happy.” 

That’s the other thing that you feel when you’re in Balé Dutung. Apart from the serene gardens, the amazing art and food, you will feel the love in this place.  

Stay updated with the latest from Claude Tayag. Visit his official Facebook page here: www.facebook.com/claude.tayag. 

Banner photo courtesy of SM Supermalls

Image of Ms. Marry Ann Quioc-Tayag courtesy of Chef Claude Tayag