How Chef Miko Calo Is Challenging Culinary Norms

Pol Divina

Smoke never bothered Miko Calo. Burning coal to reach a bright orange heat was a skill she’d mastered since her childhood in northern Mindanao. It comes naturally, then, for her to set searing lumps of coal one by one in a deep aluminum box and squeeze a smaller pot filled with lobes of raw foie gras de canard alongside the embers. She covers the entire box to allow the smoke to infuse the duck liver and mimic the scents of an old-fashioned inihaw as it cooks unhurriedly.

Meanwhile, members of Miko’s team—all women—peel, slice, and toast local shallots to simmer slowly with sugar cane vinegar. The duck liver, now shrunk and compact in a pool of duck fat, is carefully removed from the smoldering heat, power-blended with the shallots and vinegar, and pressed through an ultra-fine sieve to produce afoie gras gastrique, which is to be served with miso-cured duck breast.

This isn’t the backyard grill at her father’s house in Butuan City, but the kitchen of Makati Shangri-La, where Miko is bound to excite the local palate with her unique culinary personality. Offering a residency to a local chef had never been done before at any luxury hotel in Manila, much less to a woman. In this latest endeavor, Miko leads her team beyond the distinctively French menu of her previous restaurant, Metronome, an award-winning restaurant and for which she earned the title of Chef of the Year in 2022.

Duck & Foie Gras

At the Sage Grill of the five-star hotel, Miko presents a menu that reflects the kind of food she has always wanted to prepare since setting out on her own. "I've always looked at dishes—maybe French, maybe Asian—wondering how they would look and taste if I were to use Filipino ingredients," says Miko. "That's how I think and who I am. I always begin with my being Filipino. My food is very personal."

Miko was born and raised in Butuan City but came to Manila at age 13. Since then, Pampanga had as well become as much a part of her palate as Agusan del Norte, her aunt having been the only daughter-in-law of a large Kapampangan family.

Her foie gras gastrique takes inspiration from a homemade sarsa lechon from Arayat for which men—and invariably always men—grill pork liver over open flame to achieve that unmistakable smoky depth. For Miko, however, kitchen work is genderless, whether burning live coal or shucking oysters, to name a few basic tasks. Being a woman, hiring women, leading women, and shaping their work ethic are irrelevant in cooking good food.

"I didn’t set out to hire only women," Miko explains. "It just so happens that the most persistent and disciplined I’ve worked with are all women. If I tell them I want shallots brunoise cut to exactly, precisely the same size and shape, I don’t hear any excuses."

"What does authenticity in food really mean? Is it the ingredients? The recipes?" Miko asks. "My food is authentic to me and my experience as a cook."

Being Filipino, Cooking French

"Asian chefs who have trained in classic French techniques have the advantage," says Miko. "The Asian palate knows what umami is by instinct and Asian chefs know how to achieve that particular sensation. Umami is in our DNA."

Miko’s use of Asian ingredients within the relentless discipline of classic French cooking is nothing new, of course. For over two decades, French-trained chefs like her have tapped into their own local terroir and deployed ingredients alien to haute cuisine, while earning renown in the process.

"Going back to one’s roots," as Miko herself puts it, is evident in the ingredients she and her team harness in their latest menu: kabayawá (a lime endemic to northern Mindanao); tabon-tábon (a nut whose pulp people in Agusan use to wash their kinilaw); "atsal" bell peppers; kamias; durian (for dessert); burong asan (fresh fish fermented with rice for no more than three days); puretabang talangka (baby crab fat); and sugar cane vinegar from Pampanga.

Boudin & Etag

"I come from a family of purists," Miko says. "Growing up, I’d hear comments like ‘no pepino (cucumbers) in a real kinilaw’ or ‘only gatas damulag (carabao’s milk) for a real leche flan.’ But I’m cooking my own food—Filipino ingredients with French techniques—and my food is real to me."

Hence, the Kapampangan burong asan becomes a silken velouté after being simmered with fish stock and cream, passed through a fine sieve, emulsified with knobs of butter, and drizzled over John Dory and local carpet shell clams. In Miko’s opinion, the latter are sweeter and heftier than the palourdes clams normally used for linguine alle vongole.

Likewise, the everyday dinuguan is recast as a boudin noir à la royale with pork jus, cream, egg—simmered and sieved repeatedly for silk-satin smoothness. The "black pudding" is steamed slowly and patiently in a covered bamboo tray, then misted with sugar cane vinegar and topped with roasted almonds, edible begonia flowers, and caramelized etag (salt-cured and smoked pork belly from the Cordilleras) for added umami. Sweet, sour, salt, umami, and a faintly smoky scent ripple together perfectly, nothing too much or too little.

Savory Sable

In a nod to her father’s kinilaw (of shrimp, tuna, tanigue, malasugi, or lapu lapu), Miko blends together coconut vinegar infused with the fragrance of kabayawá and coconut milk steeped with the pulp of tabon-tábon. Unlike her father’s rustic "kinilaw by hand" that he whips up virtually on the fly, Miko strains both liquids separately to guarantee smoothness and pours the coconut vinaigrette (as it were) carefully over air-flown fine de claire oysters from southwestern France.

Likewise, Miko pays tribute to the famous Butuan lechon in a "bell pepper and lemongrass purée" she partners with grilled Ibérico presa (her nickname for it is the "BXU sauce," after the airport code for Butuan City). Spring onions, "atsal" bell peppers, lemongrass, garlic, and purple onions are caramelized to the right sweetness with rendered pork lard; roasted, ground, and sieved to make a savory, aromatic purée.

"It’s all about having a clear and definite point of view," Miko says. "I go back to flavors I grew up with, flavors that formed my palate—but controlled by solid technique."

Peach & Durian

Looking Back, Moving Forward

What makes Miko’s food unique is a direct and personal experience of the ingredients she uses, in the dishes that inspire her creative invention. Nostalgia shapes Miko’s palate: her grandmother’s pinahilisan (rendered pork fat) poured over steamed rice; tidtad sabó (a dinuguan soup soured with kamias) unique to her uncle’s home in Arayat; or the scents of ripe durian, lemongrass, and newly-roasted cacao beans. Miko doesn’t draw inspiration from recipe books or writing we now call "food literature" (though she herself keeps Moleskine notebooks with scribbled recipes), but from the sensuality of culinary memory.

Miko pushes the culinary envelope with her clever (read: technical) use of Filipino ingredients, tempered and restrained by the unforgiving discipline of haute cuisine française. Since her early days at École Gregoire-Ferrandi—not to mention seven years of intense training with Joël Robuchon in Paris, London, and Singapore—Miko has never abandoned the idea that Filipino ingredients, thoughtfully deployed, could be made into dishes equal in refinement and sophistication to the classic French dishes that inspired them.

Chef Miko Calo and her all-female team

"My first week at Gregoire-Ferrandi was a real eye-opener," Miko shares. "One of my professors—French, of course—told me to tone down my palate. He said my flavors were too strong and my vegetables had too much of a crunch, which to me is very Asian."

This obsession with being able to taste various ingredients and detect all the flavor notes as they roll on the tongue is a hallmark of Butuan cuisine (clarity and integrity of flavor, if you will). Pampango food, on the other hand, lends itself more to creative reinvention, Miko says, owing to the richness and depth of flavor as well as sophistication in cooking techniques (why grill pork liver for a sarsa lechon, for instance). Clearly, it is this sensitivity toward Filipino ingredients and a disciplined approach in harnessing their possibilities were what attracted members of Miko’s team to her in the first place. Being a woman may not matter for a chef of Miko’s level of accomplishment, but it clearly does for the younger set who look to her for guidance and training.

"Women don’t shy away from asking questions or owning up to their mistakes and that makes them eminently trainable," Miko says.

Miko’s former restaurant was where she discreetly began pushing the envelope. Metronome was her first foray into Manila’s restaurant scene, where she hinted to where she wanted to go eventually: hamachi kinilaw scented with kabayawá; lobster spaghettini made with the juice from fresh shrimp head (reminiscent of the pancit langlang served in her uncle’s Arayat home); or even a chocolate dessert using cacao from four different areas in Mindanao (including one from Agusan del Sur). Every chef for her current residency—from sous chef to pastry chef—came from Metronome’s kitchen, where she wheedled and coaxed, chastised and rebuked her staff to her exacting standards.

Whether Miko's cosmopolitan approach to cooking works or not is clearly a matter of preference and taste, but that doesn't stop her from pushing gastronomic boundaries. Indeed, asking whether the dishes are "authentic" seems irrelevant given that cuisines do not (and cannot) exist or evolve in a vacuum, away from outside influences.

"What does authenticity in food really mean? Is it the ingredients? The recipes?" Miko asks. "My food is authentic to me and my experience as a cook."

Marcos Calo Medina is Miko’s first cousin. Though currently residing in Arayat, Pampanga, where his father’s family is from, Marc travels to his mother’s hometown of Butuan, Agusan del Norte on a regular basis to enjoy kinilaw and lechon on a regular basis.

Food Styling by Chichi Tullao-Garcia