Chef Kevin David of Restaurant Idalia: ‘We just make good food’
It all began with freshly-made pasta, which he relished during a family trip to Italy when he was a teenager.
Chef Kevin David, like most Filipinos, grew up on pasta from the box, boiled and topped with sweet pomodoro.
“Pasta was the reason I became a chef,” says the 6-ft.-4-in. tall Kevin, the executive chef of Restaurant Idalia on Valero St. in Salcedo Village. “When I first travelled to Europe, I had fresh pasta for the first time. It kind of blew my mind, changed everything, changed my perspective about, I guess, pasta or noodles.”
You could say the unfurling of the road to Restaurant Idalia began with the unfurling of the tagliatelle (a long, flat, Italian noodle similar to fettucine but narrower) in the Frutti di Mare that he ordered.
“I never had anything like that in my life. I was used to eating, you know, the overcooked spaghetti with the Filipino Bolognese. The sweet one.”
Then after he had the fresh pasta, there was no turning back for Kevin, the firstborn of pilot Capt. Reg David and his wife Shan Dioquino-David.
“I realized I didn’t like the pasta I was used to. I was eating it out of sustenance,” he confesses now.
After learning how to make fresh pasta, he doesn’t eat pasta for sustenance anymore. For what? “Pleasure,” he answers in a heartbeat.
At Restaurant Idalia, they make pasta out of sourdough. “We do a lot of fresh pasta. I’ve always appreciated how something so simple could be something so delicious. I think I’ve been tied to fresh pasta ever since I started my career as a young cook.”
That fresh-pasta moment in Europe (he wasn’t sure if it was in Rome or Santorini) made him realize later on that if he wanted to eat the kind of food he only gets to taste in restaurants abroad without burning a hole in his pocket, he had to don an apron and cook it himself. As soon as he returned home to the Philippines, he started watching the Food Network, reading more food books and started going more often to the supermarket, familiarizing himself with fruits and vegetables.
“As simple as it sounds, I think being around that environment was enough for me to tell myself, okay, maybe I should find a school just for cooking. Culinary arts was very new when I was younger, especially in this country.”
He enrolled in Enderun in Taguig before he decided he wanted to learn on the job, in the kitchens of New York’s renowned restaurants.
“I tried to get into the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, in New York, but was just too expensive. So I just knocked on the door of every kitchen, asking if they had a job for peeling potatoes or for dishwashing. Thank God someone said, ‘Okay, we need someone,’"Kevin recalls.
He worked his way up, learning from his fellow cooks and chefs.
“I’ve been mentored a lot, and I appreciate everyone along the way,” he says gratefully. From New York, he also worked in Austin, Texas and was in Los Angeles when the pandemic broke out.
At the time, he was in line for promotion in a restaurant owned by Melissa Perello, a Michelin-starred chef.
“She was very good. She was very hands on. She’s very precise, very disciplined, but she knows how to have a good time as well,” he says of Melissa.
Then the pandemic interrupted his culinary career in Los Angeles. Melissa decided to concentrate on her restaurants in San Francisco.
Kevin flew home to be his brother Kenneth’s best man and…the opportunities in Manila unfurled like a tagliatelle before him. A month after his brother’s wedding, a work opportunity already presented itself.
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While Kevin was in New York, he watched a movie on Netflix where the lead characters, an American artist and an Italian chef, named their daughter “Idalia.” It means “behold the sun,” “something that brings brightness” and “strong woman.”
“For some reason ‘Idalia’ resonated with me. So, I wrote it down one of my notebooks, and I told myself I was going to use it one day, and fast forward when I came back, I started my pop-up and I couldn’t think of a name. So I just called it Idalia.” And now, he’s executive chef of Restaurant Idalia, which his family co-owns.
According to Chef Kevin, Restaurant Idalia’s cooking has four pillars: fresh pasta (but of course!), sourdough, fermentation and wood-fired cooking.
“We incorporate a lot of wood-fired cooking. Caveman cooking. Why wood? Because it has a flavor. We get santol wood. And it just has that very sweet, smoky note that reminds me a lot of hickory and apple wood since I don’t want to import wood,” Kevin points out.
“I believe that wood or the smoke is another layer of flavor, that we we incorporate into the steak, the pork, the lamb, the chicken. Actually, most of our proteins get cooked in the hearth.”
Idalia is a believer in fermentation and it ferments its own fish sauce!
“So we do it the Italian way. We use fish and squid and we put koji (used in Japanese fermentation) and salt. And after six weeks, we extract it to incorporate in our dishes instead of using rather new fish sauce from the store,” he explains.
“So it’s the whole ethos of not losing anything, at the same time, a simple product with water itself, given time, rewards you wholesomely with flavor.”
Idalia ferments fruits like the fermented apple for the jam with the Iberico pork that is very popular on the menu, which changes day to day, depending on the availability of the freshest ingredients.
On a shelf on the restaurant’s first floor is also a big jar of fermented tomatoes that they use for pomodoro.
“Instead of using white wine for cooking, why not use the fermented tomato liquid, which is of the same acidic flavor profile?” he points out.
“So we’re incorporating as much umami without really telling people. When they say, this is good, this is different, we know we did our job,” Chef Kevin, who works six days a week in the sleek industrial-themed, two-story Restaurant Idalia, believes. He towers in the open kitchen with his height, skill and the extent of his knowledge and experience.
“Because when people ask us, we don’t really have a cuisine. When people ask me, what kind of food do you guys make, I honestly say, ‘We just make good food’.”
His father Reg is a pilot and his mother Shan, a jetsetter who knows the travel industry inside out. I asked Kevin why he forged his own path. Though he admires them both, he decided to stoke his own fire—literally.
“Honestly, I just love to eat,” smiles Kevin, a happily married father of one. “There’s the joy of eating, as my chef would say. There’s something therapeutic about it, that feeling of eating good food and just being full. I love that feeling.”
Restaurant Idalia beckons at 112 Valero, Salcedo Village, Makati. You may reach them at +639988642525
