Jorge Mendez uses his reimaginings of Japanese cuisine to tell the story of his life.

Late in 2022, my husband was at his work desk reading something on his phone. He looks up at me and asks, &ldquo;Do you want to do a tasting menu in Quezon City?&rdquo; Our friends booked a group reservation that was difficult to come by. Two people had to beg off at the last minute and our friends were looking to fill the vacated seats.
This is how I found myself in a car traversing Aurora Boulevard to get to an unassuming condominium building. We walked towards the ground floor and there was Mōdan, a small restaurant specializing in progressive Japanese food. I came into dinner not knowing anything about Mōdan. I didn&rsquo;t know that they just opened and we were about to sample the restaurant&rsquo;s very first degustation menu. There were a lot of high points for our party but the night is now a blur of stories, questions, and exquisite things entering our mouths. There&rsquo;s a moment though that encapsulated my feeling about the dinner. There&rsquo;s an Instagram story one of my friends took (the same one who invited us) &mdash; where the server brought out the Nabe, a claypot rice dish that was piled with scallops, unagi (freshwater eel), and wagyu beef. To the side of the clay pot was my face, jaw to the chest, marveling at the spectacle in front of me. At the present day, I&rsquo;m on a call with Mōdan&rsquo;s head chef, 30-year-old Jorge Mendez. I catch him inside his car, parked in a gas station after running errands for Mōdan and his other restaurants

Chicken Wings stuffed with Caviar Rice, Shoyuzuke Eggyolk, Caviar, Chicken Feet, Nira Oil

I regaled him with memories of that evening I had with his tasting menu. I also told him that it has been impossible to book another reservation since then. Mendez was very apologetic. &ldquo;We were surprised at how the reception was, how people wanted our food, our restaurant, and how we progressed.&rdquo; Mendez runs M ōdan like a Japanese kitchen. &ldquo;In restaurants in Japan, the chefs will prep for the head chef. Then during the service [the head chef] is the one, or I am the one who is cooking. It&rsquo;s a very different culture.&rdquo;
&ldquo;[In] some of the other restaurants, all the work is from the chefs and the head chef is [only the one] plating the food. In Mōdan, it&rsquo;s different. I&rsquo;m the one who&rsquo;s cooking and they plate for me,&rdquo; he adds.
It was as I remembered it that night. As I anticipated one of the dishes that was brought to me, I looked over behind my back, and I had a view of Mendez with his pans in a blaze of fire from the stovetops.
In Japanese food, a hallmark of its cuisine is its flavor profiles. There is the usual salty, spicy, sweet, sour, and bitter &mdash; but with Japanese food, there is also umami. Umami is the term used to describe the savory, rich note that naturally occurs in many Japanese ingredients like shiitake mushrooms, miso paste, and bonito flakes. These flavor profiles are something every person who loves Japanese food is attuned to, but all the more so for Mendez where it takes a more personal dimension. He grew up with his mother making this kind of food for him as she spent years working in Japan. This food is special to him.

Aged Buri, Iyokan Tossa, Kyuri, Wasabi oil, Dill

Mendez, though, is not interested in adhering to traditional Japanese preparation and methods for this restaurant. He has a background in Research and Development (R&amp;D) in the food industry, where a lot of his job is to make sure food like Spanish or Italian taste the way they&rsquo;re supposed to (or at least to approximate the flavors of our popular imagination). Along the way, he got to finetune his techniques from stints cooking in the kitchens of culinary luminaries such as Margarita Fores in the Philippines and Andre Chiang in Taiwan.
All of these have led Mendez to this premise: to use his breadth of experience from various cuisines to arrive at dishes that distinctly taste Japanese.
Take for example Mōdan&rsquo;s debasaki, a chicken wing dish. They are traditionally made by deep-frying them in a sweet-salty sauce. Mendez plays around with his version. &ldquo;For our wings, we dry it like a Peking Duck, so we baste it, we dry it for three days to get that nice crispness,&rdquo; he says. The result still has that umami sweet-salty flavor you recognize in a debasaki, but it comes by way of China.
The debasaki is one of the dishes that make an appearance once more for Mōdan&rsquo;s second tasting menu, which just launched as of this writing. The first menu included dishes inspired by mentors, colleagues, and friends. When it was time to switch things up, Mendez found his way back to where his love for food began.
&ldquo;The theme for Menu Number Two is the paper crane. The reason behind that is because my mom worked in Japan, and every time she sent us pasalubong, she put some paper cranes,&rdquo; offers Mendez. What happens for this series is a meditation on the different parts of a crane, and each part corresponds to a certain dish in the repertoire.

Apart from his mother, his son had a hand in this menu. &ldquo;During the pandemic, one of the things that my son and I bonded over was making paper cranes and planes. His six-year-old would get really frustrated and couldn&rsquo;t make a paper plane and he&rsquo;d crumple the paper and throw it away,&rdquo; says Mendez.
The menu has a dessert made to mimic crumpled paper. Diners are invited to smash the paper to reveal another layer. &ldquo;When you crush it, there&rsquo;s ice cream inside. It represents how some kids are like that. They get frustrated [with] not doing, and that&rsquo;s the first step to doing. You get frustrated at first, but when you try again, you&rsquo;ll see, that&rsquo;s the first step to knowing you&rsquo;re on the right path. You keep on improving.&rdquo;
Mendez gets the most animated when he&rsquo;s talking about his family, especially his children. In the first menu, he created a castella cheesecake with kuromitsu (Japanese sugar syrup) cream and ikura (salmon roe) dessert in honor of his eldest daughter, who he describes as being &ldquo;crazy for cheese.&rdquo;
Mendez is a bit nervous about how the second menu will be received, especially since the first made such a strong debut. But it is enough for him to be able to get it out there. He is grateful. &ldquo;I learned that cooking is everything to me, and it has been amazing to know that I can create dishes by taking inspiration from those who are important to me and presenting it on a plate,&rdquo; he shares.
He is already thinking about the third menu. &ldquo;So first, I learned from my mentors&mdash;the reason why we did [the first] menu. Now it's my inspiration, my mom who taught me how to cook. Okay. Inspiration done. And now, since I travel a lot, the third one is about spreading your wings. Yes.&rdquo;

A Full Plate

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