La Maison Punjab

    

"Because home, family, and love are always familiar."

    Reading La Maison Punjab's backstory gives depth to my personal experience of the place that I can only describe as a space of intimacy, one where real conversations transpire enveloped in a gastronomical experience that is nourishment to the visual, tactile, olfactory and of course gustatory sense. Traveling 100 kilometers from my home in Ormoc to Tacloban City to take part in the offering Chef Sandeep and Chef Yan extends is a journey that is certainly worthwhile. 

    We spend our whole lives trying to find home in people, places, experiences, and yes, food. Our definition of home shifts and transforms through the different timelines of our lives. I read recently Derek Walcott's Love After Love. Essentially it reminds us how most if not all of us after a long journey to faraway lands, an exile if you will, return to the place we have abandoned in this quest for meaning. Only to realise that while it may not be necessarily be a physical place, it is physical in the sense that it is where our heart and spirit reside for a time. And where the heart and spirit is content, the body settles, follows suit. The 'familiar', a sense of safety and belonging is expressed in "You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart To itself, to the stranger who has loved you". To return and be embraced by the familiar also means to acknowledge the strangeness brought about by the various and numerous exiles we have taken. 

    Entering and immersing in this space of the indeed familiar and yet new, of La Maison Punjab, in albeit a short amount of time is definitely an experience compelling enough to again introspect, reflect on how my personal quest for home has changed and on how much of it has remained the same.  

    I have no photos of the food that justifies its beauty enough. Suffice it to say that my senses clamored to savor it right away or perhaps subconsciously, at the time, I just wanted it to be my own private experience as every journey, gastronomical in nature or not, is. 

    Today, I am grateful for this place for the gift of reflection and a beautiful gastronomical experience welcoming me to a sense of belonging--home. 

La Maison Punjab

Tacloban City, Leyte

April 23-24, 2023

Love After Love

-Derek Walcott

The time will come

When, with elation, 

You will greet yourself arriving

At your own door, in your own mirror,

And each will smile at he other's welcome,

And say, sit here, Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life, whom you ignored 

For another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,

Peel your image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.