For chef Tara Monsod, the dish is helping to expand the breadth of Filipino food that make it onto restaurant menus
It was from a vendor in Batangas, during a holiday trip to the Philippines as a teenager, that chef Tara Monsod first tried chicken inasal. “I remember specifically all these chicken legs cooking on these coals,” says Monsod, the executive chef of San Diego’s. “Smoke everywhere and watching him baste it and hearing the sizzle sound always stuck with me.”
At Animae, the opulent wagyu steakhouse from chef Brian Malarkey, Monsod presents cooking that could be described as “Asian fusion,” or “modern Asian American,”the former feels. Having grown up with a “commuter family” in the city of Palmdale, north of Los Angeles, Monsod cites all kinds of inspiration: One day, her family would be eating Filipino food in the Valley; the next, Mexican food in Boyle Heights.
When it comes to Filipino dishes at the restaurant, Monsod sees one of her goals as expanding what makes it to menus. “There’s so much more to our cuisine than just lumpia and pancit,” says Monsod, pointing to two dishes that dominate the understanding of Filipino food in the United States.
What Monsod wants to stand out in her inasal are the aromatics in the marinade: ginger and garlic, but especially lemongrass and calamansi, a citrus that’s often described as a cross between a mandarin orange and lime. While calamansi, which is native to the Philippines, is now more readily available from San Diego’s specialty food purveyors, Monsod previously got hers from her uncle’s backyard or from cooks who had family trees, a testament to immigrant resourcefulness.
“Anywhere in San Diego, if you see a backyard with a calamansi tree in the back, that’s a sign that a Filipino family has lived there,” Monsod says. “It shows that it’s something that they needed that they couldn’t get here, and a lot of people brought it over and literally grew it from seed.” There’s a community aspect to that too, she notes: “The first thing you do as a Filipino, if you need calamansi in San Diego, is you think of what friends you have.