“Kumquats, peaches, berries - in the winter, we put persimmons in it - whatever’s in season. “What I like about it is that you can change it,” said the mother of two, her long, black hair pulled back in a ponytail that made her look about half her 43 years. As she built the dish, it became a perfect equation of color and texture, contrast and temperature. And the chef’s beloved flan? The squares of custard could easily have been served alone, an example of lovely satin geometry. On the table, the halo-halo ingredients looked like a plated dessert diagram: frozen component, base, garnish, sauce, crunchy bits. white-tablecloth restaurants as Patina, Bastide and Mélisse, and earlier this year was a James Beard nominee for outstanding pastry chef. A Culinary Institute of America graduate, she’s an alum of such notable L.A. Instead, the dish seemed like a master class in pastry skills - a class Manzke would be highly qualified to teach. “I’m a sucker for anything flan.”Īs Manzke arranged the components of the dish at République, the gorgeous restaurant that occupies a legendary space in Los Angeles - before it was République, it was the bell tower-topped restaurant Campanile, and before that it was a brick edifice built for Charlie Chaplin - it was easy to forget halo-halo’s street food origins. “I never liked the beans.” If not beans, then flan, lots of it, smooth as silk and rich with caramel, made from a recipe Manzke got from her sister. “Growing up, I liked halo-halo, but I never liked some of the things that went into it,” said Manzke, a native of Manila who came to the U.S. And the beans - often a combination of mung, red and chickpeas - are noticeably absent. She has the tapioca, rich and silky with coconut milk, stand in for the evaporated milk that is in most renditions of the dish. “It’s a very traditional dessert,” said Manzke, “but we didn’t want to make it too traditional we wanted our own spin on it.” So instead of using ube ice cream (“ube is very predictable”), the distinctive purple concoction made from yams that is in most versions of halo-halo, Manzke uses either coconut or pandan ice cream. “But if you didn’t grow up eating it, you’d be like, ‘What? What were they thinking?’ It’s like whatever’s in the refrigerator.” “It’s a fun dessert,” Manzke said recently at République, the Hancock Park bistro she owns and operates with her husband, chef Walter Manzke. It’s also just a little weird, which may be part of its appeal. It is a homey dish, a childhood dish, the Southeast Asian version of our hot fudge sundae or banana split - a hodgepodge assembly of ice cream and crushed ice, gelée and fruit, tapioca and crispy rice that forms a colorful and deeply craveable dessert. Halo-halo - “mix mix” in Tagalog - is a deeply emblematic dish, sold on street corners in the Philippines and lately in restaurants all over America as part of the recent renaissance of Filipino cuisine. Consider Margarita Manzke’s halo-halo, a dish she grew up eating as a kid in the Philippines, learned long ago to make herself and now has translated to both of her Los Angeles restaurants - a little Filipino food stall and an ambitious French bistro. I would have loved a progression of I, YOU, HE/SHE, WE, THEY (or a subset of those), but that's a minor ding, easily overlooked given the cool discovery of four superlative phrases that followed the same format.In the hands of a gifted chef, a dish can operate rather like an object lesson, the pattern of sauce and arrangement of ingredients demonstrating her relationship to a cuisine, a memory, a culture. Should crosswords be pure entertainment or a vessel for expanding solvers' horizons? There is no right answer, more a difference in philosophy. Even if it's only a single entry, it seems to sour their experience, making them feel dumb. Some solvers gripe that they detest when my puzzles shove learning at them, when they just wanted ten minutes of pure entertainment. Some beginning solvers have a ton of trouble figuring out where spaces should go, though, which makes JEMELE HILL even tougher - is it JEM ELEHILL? J.E. (Records of my AP French results say otherwise.) As long as an entry doesn't stand in the way of my victorious solve, I like a bit of learning. This sports fan didn't know her, so I appreciated that Erik was careful to make every crossing answer gettable. People will debate whether JEMELE HILL is a Monday-friendly entry. I did wonder why I AM THE GREATEST didn't make the cut, but I imagine it wasn't the greatest for crossword symmetry. Neat to see so many "(pronoun) = (awesome)" phrases. Needless to say, my AP French exam didn't go well. "Je ne sais pas" is one of the few phrases I do remember. This one brings me back to my days of high school French, attempting to memorize conjugations.
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