Le Cirque

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Restaurants
Cuisine:	French
Location:	USA

Now we all know that the television waves are filled with the old news about Her Excellency's overpriced food, so I assume that you know what I am talking about. This is the restaurant, Le Cirque, a nice restaurant with in America with wine and lobster and a million's worth of our cash.

But as we all know, I have not yet gone there. So who am I to make a review of its food?

I am a blogger in a country with freedom of expression, that's why, so that means I can say anything anytime except when I can't, like say, when I am barely breathing after being chased by government hitmen.

So where were we? Ah, yes, the review. Now we all know that the money that could have been used to improve the general lives of our peoples is now sitting in an overpriced foodshop, having been used to purchase overrated sea insects which a century earlier is fed to common criminals. And the best rotten grapes our president has traded in exchange for a nicer name by the time she is supposed to leave. Just think, one more year and she is willing to sacrifice her name, her last few remaining shreds of dignity for rotten grapes.

And to think that her group is still defending their decision to eat in such a store while I myself had nothing to eat! (Actually, it's because my siesta is a tad bit too long, but that's not the point.)

Now if we listen to those reds however, we may find a rather slippery slope of losing our culture, our civilization, our national identity as we know it. If they get what they want, all earth will have to be farmland to feed the masses which are too numerous for this planet to sufficiently feed. Also, when they decide to use that dreaded katsudon , they will massacre a third of earth by the worst death of all: boredom. That means that culinary arts will give way to mass-production of food with all its drawbacks of being environmentally unsustainable and totally unpalatable.

Now art, ars gratia artis, old Tom and Jerry shows always have proclaimed. Art for art's sake. Art, the good things that happen when the human mind transcends this physical world, taking a few chunks of the time-space and forming it into something worth having been made. Art should not be limited by anything, not even by the need to feed the masses. And that includes culinary art.

However, most forms of art are unsustainable. The beauty of bombed Manila is one. The human face, an artwork indeed, ages and changes into something which may not be considered art. The reason why fine arts always need government support is that all those painting can only be traded around without actually being disposable. Art can't be disposed, unlike food or cars or slaves. That's why demand is so low, because supply manages to be both high and low.

Now the culinary arts, that is different. Do you encase your birthday cake in a glass case? Of course not. That is the beauty of the culinary arts. Unlike the Spolarium or Burning Glass on Poop # 4, chocolate spaghetti straps are edible whether you like it or really like it. And when you don't, well, you don't have a choice because it will decay quickly anyway. That means that culinary arts can't be kept in a dusty, musky museum, so to have culinary arts is to eat the creation, make another, sell, and eat. It's sustainable art while at the same time feeding the curator.

Since I know that I have taken too much of your time drawling about anything other that the restaurant, let me end this quickly. To take sea bugs and rotten grapes and find them to still be edible, good. For finding out that they can be sold for so so much more than they can conceivably be, and being able to maintain the illusion that lobster is a luxury food, wine a luxury drink, that is genius and skill. For elating them edibles into art, they have become part of what makes a Filipino a Filipino: a purveyor-craftsman of fine dishes wherever and whenever. And for being a non-Filipino and still managing to hook the leader of the Filipinos into spending my stipends on food, amazing. Happy, Maccioni?

Even shorter, Le Cirque has made art, sustainable art, out of protofood, for the sake of it in the spirit of progressing global culture, and managed to make the president eat it in exchange for her delicadeza as well as a few hundred thousand pesos, thus saving the world from communists, environmental degradation, ennui, and the katsudon. Now that is good. Its only problem? I wasn't part of the entourage.