At Uno Restaurant, the bread basket rises to the occasion

Update: Uno Restaurant permanently closes its doors after December 24, 2020.

Like an old, reliable friend, Uno Restaurant has been welcoming new and loyal diners in the very same spot in the Tomas Morato Avenue area of Quezon City, where it first opened 25 years ago. Step inside and the same monastic vibe greets you – minimalist off-white walls, plain white linen over wooden tables, a small board listing the day’s specials and vitrines in one corner displaying freshly baked breads.

Jose Mari Relucio, who studied at the California Culinary Academy before returning to Manila in 1989, has been serving up nouvelle cuisine at Uno since 1995, but apart from his light and delicate dishes with a heavy emphasis on fresh ingredients, it’s fair to say that the breads he bakes in-house and serves free to guests have earned a following of their own.

I see why when a server brings me a basket of sliced warm ciabatta and its light brown crust crackles as I slather butter over it. “It’s the way I like to eat, and I wanted to share that experience – the way you use bread to sop up sauce – with the diners,” Relucio says. “Dining is about little subtleties coming together and enhancing the experience. Serving bread becomes part of the whole thing that you enjoy.”

Depending on the day of the week, Relucio bakes baguette, ciabatta, focaccia, pagnotta (a “soured” dough that uses a wet rice tamed down by the subsequent addition of flour) and Parker House rolls. He even uses the same equipment he bought in the 1990s – a charred deck oven and an equally old-school convection oven that requires spare parts to be imported from the United States when it breaks down.

After all these years, the number of breads he bakes each day constantly changes. If a customer buys a lot, he simply makes more. “There is no planning or forecasting,” he says. “We’re very mom and pop.”

The low-key restaurateur, who tends to shy away from publicity,  also employs the same traditional techniques of bread-making that he’s always followed.

Relucio has a 12- to 18-hour head start before the actual forming of the bread, and combines a pre-dough mix with an older fermentation to the rest of the dough, yielding better flavor to his finished products. “There’s time involved,” he says of the long rise process. “Waiting, no rushing.”

The technique has served Relucio well.

As food trends come and go, his restaurant keeps plugging along, offering patrons who come thrice a week the kind of cooking they look forward to. “We just keep on doing what we do,” he says. “People will go out to explore food then come back to the ground. That’s okay with me, being the ground. I don’t need to be the sky.” 144 B Scout Fuentebella St, Diliman, Quezon City, +63 2 8374 0774; fb.com/unorestaurantmorato