BQ ARCHIVE
Vol I, No. 1
Sept 08, 2004
by agnesdv
ARCHIVE #004
crêpes à
l'orange and hotkeks
One of the best crêpes on this side of the planet is at Cul de Sac Café. Cul de sac is French for dead-end, and that is where this café is located, at a dead-end lobby at Glorietta mall, near the side entrance of rustan's (a floor below the cinemas). They have their little prep area right in the middle of the lobby where everyone passes, and the café is the closest a chef can make his preparations, well, fastfood. The crew doesn't cook here, everything is cooked in some secret place somewhere, and brought to this place with its old wood effect setting. Everything here is delicious, and their secret? Serve everything with fresh basil leaves.
Back to the crêpes. They have all kinds of flavors, but my favorite is crêpe à l'orange. My first crêpe à l'orange here was perfect, the last one was perfect too, and the ones in between. Yes, why try other flavors when you've already found the perfect one that suits you? It's a blend of hot crêpes and cold yogurt ice cream, rough texture you bite into and smooth cream that melts in your mouth, and the tangy orange sauce that contrasts with the sweetness of the sprinkled powdered sugar. You can become anonymous eating Cul de sac crêpes, yet never alone.
Cul de sac food is European food, adapted to
the spicier Filipino tongue. It's fast, it's well prepared and
well-thought out, and it's good and cheap considering what you're getting,
but expensive if you want to compare it with Mcdonald's price.
If you want to talk about price, consider my next favorite crêpe, the
Filipino version, hotkek. Sold mostly in public markets by manangs (I
think the public markets in the provinces would be safer), this is hotcake
batter mixed with lots of water, to produce more hotcakes and more income
for manang. This results in paper thin hotcakes which could compete with
Cul de sac's crêpes, spread thickly with cheap margarine, sprinkled with
granulated sugar, rolled and handed to you to eat while still hot. My
advice, eat it once it's cooked before you start worrying about e. colis
and the people staring at you. Here, you can never be anonymous,
impossible to look invisible when you're trying to eat hot hotcake while
standing on the sidewalk. That's for the price of P3 each. I can eat 3.
remember those really yellow thin hotcakes of your childhood that haunts
you when you can't get your hands on one? that's hotkek.
Between Cul de sac's crêpes and my province's hotcakes, I'll choose the hotkek anytime. It's very Filipino, it's comfort food, it's cheap and original, and in my own humble way, I'm actually helping define the Filipino identity.
"My first crêpe à
l'orange here was perfect, the last one was perfect too, and the ones in
between. Yes, why try other flavors when you've already found the perfect
one that suits you?"