asianTraveler Magazine

Sitting unobtrusively on Commerce Avenue, the main artery leading from Alabang Town Center to Festival Mall in Metro Manila, is the French Corner. Since 2005, it has dished out a coterie of dishes that keep the Muntinlupa elite in high spirits with gourmet food just around the corner. Nobody else could have pulled something like this off except the one and only King of the mountain, Billy King.

Chef William Billy A. King fell in love with the Philippines after going through the usual routes of most successful chefs, from hotel to hotel, as executive chef, until he landed in Manila and set roots down here. His declaration, “I am more Filipino than many Filipinos”, has become an inarguable statement. From Le Souffle, to the Top of the Citi, The Le Chef at the Manor, and even the Casino in Carmona, each incarnation of his cuisine has been met with warm smiles and happy diners. The French Corner is no exception as it continues to dazzle with Chef Billy’s newfound obsession with proper dining.

Billy makes sure he serves nothing but good food that will not confuse the stomach, and should we dare say, does not confuse the palate. On this rare sunny afternoon, we are welcomed at the French Corner by Kevin King, erstwhile relation and restaurant manager who has made Manila his home for more than three years now. He finds that the catering business is quite good but wishes that more people would dine in. Perhaps they wish to dazzle and impress as dining in any of Billy King’s restaurants is never just a taste experience but also a journey of sight and smell.

Billy walks in, not with a set of knives in hand but a laptop, which apparently has become the instrument of choice for many restaurateurs and chefs alike nowadays. Ageless with his hair swept back, the slightest stubbles, looking more Mediterranean than Irish, and that disarming smile, he speaks of the inspiration for the French Corner. “ It’s simply good food, nothing more” - a simple statement said with the authority of decades of understanding the nuances of cuisine.

The cabal of gustatory adventure begins with a salad of roast prawns, salt cured salmon, not unlike the Swedish gravlax, and a mix of romaine, iceberg, and butter lettuce with a healthy does of arugula. Tucked away within are slivers of radish and . . .are those pomelo pulp bits? Indeed!! Walnuts complete this symphony of fresh produce. Examining each item shows different flavors ready to argue for space on the tongue - the inherent bitter aftertaste of lettuce, nutty arugula, and the earthy undertones of walnut; I wonder if this will blend with the singularly unique flavors of salmon and prawns, and the acidity of pomelo and well, the French dressing, which Billy says is light. But how can French dressing ever be light eh? The marriage of these flavors come from the earthy goodness of fresh produce and the seafood undertones that complement the dressing. We ate this dish with a relish we had not had since we last savored his cuisine at the Le Chef in Manor.

He serves what is fresh from the markets and from his supplier. Inevitably some items must be imported or sourced from purveyors that have built a reputation for reliability. Our second course was a phyllo pastry rolled and stuffed with roast vegetables in arrabiatta sauce with a sprinkling of goat cheese. Unlike most cheeses, the goat produces a lighter and softer cheese that gets its flavor from the salt used to make it. This dish looks like a Bosnian burek but stuffed this time with vegetables. It tasted much like a rolled pizza, but the similarity ends there as the freshness of the vegetables belies it. The zucchini is crisp on the outside as are the bell peppers, and the roasted nuttiness of the produce is apparent.

We go a little more serious this time with an art deco serving of a pair of pacific scallop sitting on hollandaise accompanied by a similarly sized round of sautéed spinach sitting on spinach sauce made simply by blitzing the vegetable with a light broth. It becomes all too easy to over cook a scallop into threads of tough sinewy seafood like a surimi but this is where Billy’s skills are brought to a fore.

“How do you sear this scallop without over cooking it?” I ask. Billy whips out his boyish smile and says “ secret!” Did he sear it on a hot plate or drop it into a hot pan with just a hint of some kind of au jus? That we never will know but this certainly is a good reason to come back.

As we proceed to the heavyweights, we are regaled by a generous slab of USDA Grade A sirloin simply salted and grilled and drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and a touch of balsamic. The steak is accompanied by a medley of roast vegetables. This alone is enough to make the trip worthwhile. I’ve always thought that one must never salt a steak but lessons are learned everyday as with this one. “Salt it just before putting it on the grill.” Thus the master shares his craft.

Billy likes to work with seafood. I recall the lapu lapu (grouper fish in the Philippines) fillet in cognac sauce at the old Le Souffle at Greenbelt. It had no pretensions about what it was, simply a good flaky, slightly underdone fillet, drizzled with a cognac reduction no doubt from the oils rendered from the fish. At the Le Chef he regaled us with his trips to La Union specifically to buy fresh fish. Tonight though, it’s Chilean sea bass, a fourth of what must have been a large fish. His preparation in saffron sauce had no distinct acid after taste unlike game fish such as trevally or queen fish that produces so much lactic acid during its fight against a hook, but is a very white, milky, and succulent fillet, sitting on a sauce where you can see the saffron florets floating in it. The ratatouille accompanying it is the only thing providing some form of acidity, but this only serves to cleanse the palate for the next forkful of the tasty flesh.

If only to cleanse the tongue of this sensory overload, we finally come to dessert, which is a terrine of chocolate. Layer upon layer of dark, milk, and white chocolate sitting on a sponge cake, and sliced like a well . . terrine. Chilled, each layer is a revelation of texture and taste. Each melts in its own time on the tongue, first the dark with the most butterfat, followed by the milk, then finally the white chocolate which delivers the last soaking of chocolate on the layer of sponge cake, totally eliminating the need for teeth. The body’s temperature is enough to melt a mouthful.

The real secret of success I’ve learned is to understand your core competency and stick with it. Take the soufflé for example. Not everyone can make one, not in this weather, but this is what Billy named his first foray into the restaurant business for and produce it he did. Today is no exception. Any chef will always enjoy preparing his favorite dish. This coup de grace is a Belgian chocolate soufflé with Belgian chocolate sauce. What could possibly beat that kind of ending?

This experience so far leaves me wondering how a chef’s mind can take different flavors and assemble them into a masterpiece without coming up with a mixed mash of tastes.
With each dish that comes along, Billy has this uncanny skill at keeping the flavors of the individual ingredients able to stand on their own and shine.

Call it experience, call it the result of repeating a task again and again and getting the same result, call it what you will, but to me it’s a gift. Thank you Billy, here at the French Corner, you’ve done it again.