Glenn Razon

Two kilos of ground pork, some vegetables and fish would come home from the market wrapped in old newspaper, carried in a thin plastic bag. Still cold, still damp, they would land on a makeshift wooden table beside the garlic, onions and tomatoes. His grandmother would cook most of the pork for the family, then pinch off about two hundred grams and slide it toward Glenn.

That part was his.

He was nine years old. Sometimes he shaped the meat into patties, sometimes meatballs, sometimes things with no name at all: small, uneven lumps pressed together by a child who liked being near the stove, the cutting board and the sound of oil crackling in a kawali. His grandmother let him make a mess. If something came out too salty or too oily, they threw it out. Not to worry.

Lola Apu Lita did not make speeches. She gave him little jobs and enough room to get them wrong.

His mother, Mama Nitz, was the family breadwinner, supporting Glenn, Apu Lita and the rest of the household. Glenn understood early what was expected of him: study hard, get a good job, help everybody else.

Yet when he talks about those years, what comes back first is not what they lacked. He remembers his mother and grandmother always doing something, finding another job, another way to make things work. He remembers Apu Lita coming home tired from selling tickets at the sabungan, still smiling, bringing ingredients bought with her earnings and whatever balato she had been given.

He remembers Bulanglang Babi, the Kapampangan guava-broth soup she made, and the bangera where they ate on Sundays when his mother was finally home after a week of nonstop work. The broth was slightly sour from the guava, the pork soft, the rice still steaming. If Glenn had to choose one last meal, he says it would be Bulanglang Babi.

Years later, after corporate and commercial work and all the years in between, Glenn founded Razon’s by Glenn. Only two things were inherited: the last name and the original recipes. Everything else was his own doing, both the mistakes and the successes. Just as those two hundred grams had once been his to figure out.

More than forty branches later, some of his decisions are visible on the plate. There is the overloaded palabok, made for diners who wanted more than the sparer original version: noodles disappearing beneath shrimp, chicharon, egg and sauce. There is chili oil made in-house because somebody will inevitably want more heat, but not enough to punish the mouth. Glenn wants the heat to linger for a moment, then leave.

And then there is the macapuno.

It could be mechanized. Machines would be faster and cheaper. Glenn still wants it prepared by hand because, to him, the difference is in the bite: the texture, the freshness, the way it feels in the mouth.

After two decades in the restaurant business, some things have changed easily. Others have not. Palabok can be piled higher. Heat can be adjusted. A restaurant can open another branch, then another. The macapuno stays in human hands.

“Simple is mastery,” he says.

But when Glenn talks about where he came from, he keeps returning not to a restaurant but to a kitchen: a wooden table, a kawali, his grandmother somewhere nearby, and two hundred grams of ground pork placed in front of a nine-year-old boy.