Sialo - Review - Cebu City - Cebu - The Infatuation

"When a typhoon wiped out the garden behind fashion designer Ronald Villavelez’s atelier in 2021, he decided to build an immaculate white dining room in its place. Today, Sialo hosts couples celebrating anniversaries and solo diners pacing themselves through one of the 13- to 29-course menus split into five “acts,” representing everything from seafood to staples of rural food culture. Dishes spotlight uncommonly used ingredients and crops, presented the way you’d encounter them in nature. For example, the humble takyong (local bush snail) sits on rocks and dirt made up of heritage grains like tinigib, a regional white corn, and kabog, a variety of local millet. That means you don’t have to fiddle with your fork to figure out what’s edible or not. The warm, near-whispered service makes the room feel like a small sanctuary, and from your seat, you have a full view of the kitchen where chefs prepare each course with a kind of careful reverence." - Chandra Joshua