Inside Manila's Only Authentic Taqueria

This story first appeared in Spanish on MUNCHIES ES in August 2016.

In many ways, Manila resembles certain regions in Mexico: the palm trees, half-built roads, corrupt politicians, delicious dishes, and posters with half-naked women plastered all over the place. The streets of Manila reminded me of those small places near the Gulf of Mexico, next to the jungle, with cobblestone roads and roosters singing in the wind. Manila brought me back to that charm so well described by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In this chaotic tropical world, there is one constant: Mexican food. Filipinos love the cuisine from Mexico, and there are countless so-called Mexican restaurants in the capital city. But most are are actually Tex- Mex, with just one exception: "Lo de Alberto", the brainchild of Balam Nazar.

Balam was born and raised in Nezhualcoyotl City and he's certainly not a Ferran Adria or René Redzepi trained chef; he got his training from the school of life. The origins of his cuisine come from his relationship with that melancholy that usually gets a hold of expats. After living in Europe for awhile, Balam—which means "jaguar" in his native Mayan tongue—started to cook at home, to make his own recipes, and to invite his closest friends to try his creations.

I found Balam's restaurant after doing exhaustive research on Mexican cuisine in Manila. It was quite an adventure just to get to "Lo de Alberto". Two Filipino taxi drivers told me in Tagalog and English: "I don't know where the hell that is", and the third one answered more or less the same way but finally accepted the challenge of leaving everything to fate and finding our way to the restaurant.

Lo de Alberto is located in the magical world of Pasig, a municipality of Manila inhabited by skydivers and thousands of telemarketers. When I arrived, I saw a wooden sign that said: "Lo de Alberto. The only authentic taqueria in the Philippines". Balam received us with a cold tamarindo water and horchata with ice. To any person living in Mexico this might seem like a triviality, but for someone that has spent months or years living away from home, this is a great treat. Before Balam served us our food, we talked about what took him to Manila.

"I was living and working as a cook in Europe, and after working for a summer in Mallorca, I got my things and moved to Scandinavia, where girls love me," he told me rather shyly, without any pretension. "I have a best friend there that is good friends with someone from the Philippines who was looking for a chef for his restaurant in Manila. My friend recommended me right away and here I am. It was all out of sheer luck. Once I arrived I had to put together a menu. I wanted to respect all the authentic flavors while adapting them to the local and imported ingredients.

He added: "It wasn't easy. At the beginning they wanted me to just prepare Tex-Mex food, but I got them to make some concessions and that's how we started to put together a menu of real tacos."

While we talked, a Filipino man dancing around to a Café Tacuba song served me a mushroom quesadilla with red and green salsa. Before digging in, I asked him how he managed to make a quesadilla in Asia, where there is no cheese. "That's right, there are no local cheeses," Balam said. "So this quesadilla is the result of months of experimentation. Almost all the cheese here is Monterrey Cheese, a horrible American product with saturated fat. I had to experiment. I found a delicious cheese that according my (Filipino) supplier was a mozzarella imported from Uruguay. The mushrooms come from another supplier—only he, and his conscience, knows for sure where they came from—and the salsas are made by me."

Balam uses tomatoes that aren't too ripe, and with a bit of lemon he gets the right level of acidity. He gets green tomatoes and adjusts their flavor with oranges and anato—a seasoning that in Mexico we call achiote—to give the right color and flavor to the salsa.

The quesadilla fulfilled its promise. It was perfectly balanced, and it took me right back to the sidewalks of my beautiful and much missed Mexico City. Then a delicious carnitas taco arrived. It had an impeccable texture: crunchy and fatty, and the onions and cilantro took me to Venadito of Coyoacan or any other taqueria de carnitas all throughout the great Republic of Mexico.

To make these tacos, Balam needed tortillas. After looking around, he found the only person that sells nixtamilized corn meal as well as totopos (tortilla chips). When I got there he told me, "I'm not selling you the corm meal. I can just sell you the totopos." What a jerk! The only solution was to buy the corn to make flour and then all his totopos. That's why there are always totopos in his dishes. "I also make the butter," Balam told me. To make pork butter, he simmers liempo (a kind of Filipino bacon), and once it's liquid he uses it to make his dishes.

The music is playing, and a strong smell of cilantro, onion and spices fills the air like it does in every corner of Mexico. It just happens that we are 13,000 km away with the Pacific Ocean between us.

The kitchen manager, Nikka Guinanao, trained as a cook in the US. Millions of people here learned to prepare Mexican food in the restaurants of San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Migration is one of the reasons there are so many Mexican restaurants in this Asian country.

Nika prepares the beans and gives them to Balman for him to try. He doesn't approve this time, saying, "They need salt."

A burrito made with a flour tortilla made from scratch, filled with cochinita pibil was next to arrive, followed by a golden suadero taco. It was a stellar dish with a perfect balance between fat and lean meat. Balam and Nikka looked very proud of their creation.

I had no space left to eat the cochinita pibil burrito, so I took it with me to my hotel, and around midnight I had a few bites. There, thousands of kilometers away from Yucatán, I was eating a dish from that state, adapted according to local Filipino ingredients, and all thanks to the talent of Balam Bazam, the person behind the only authentic taqueria in the Philippines.