Chef Miko Calo Is Finally Relishing Her Own Appetites

Miko Calo, a leading local light in the culinary world, is bent on reclaiming a space with her all-women team of five.

Miko Calo learned to clean fish at nine years old. She grinded cacao beans and shaped tablea with her aunt who harvested and roasted them from her own farm. She spent afternoons watching her grandmother cook pasayan pinakurat in her dirty kitchen. It was generations of Calo women at home or two houses down M. Calo street in Villa Kananga, who taught chef Miko Calo that food was about sensual satisfaction—“nourishment, deliciousness, happiness,” she says.

These days, when to christen dishes as conceptual art seems more modish, Calo’s meals and the rituals around them demand what is scarce: time, consideration, and a desire for pleasure realized with every dish. From her Butuan roots to her French education and training to her propensity to draw upon food as a vessel for reminiscence, her instincts as a culinary imagist, distilling flavors to the barest, sharpest elements, usher in a rare feeling: simple done well is as good as a feast. 

Calo sees herself as a craftswoman, whose lived experience attends a process built on culinary curiosity and a real romance for eating and giving to people. That generosity and creativity she lavishes on others is her raison d’etre in the kitchen.

Inun-unan was one of those beloved dishes Calo’s grandmother used to cook. A dish made of mangko, a type of mackerel, that you boil in vinegar, salt and spices, and served with hot rice. Her grandmother would leave the mixture marinating for a day until the mangko turned pinkish, firm but tender enough to pull apart, similar to paksiw. “Inun-unan is what Butuanons would call it,” she clarifies. “It is only the old Butuanon families who know how to speak Butuanon now.” 

For every, “Is it Butuanon? Is it Filipino? Is it French?” Calo tosses back, “It’s just me.” Her work is best perceived as a palimpsest: of her girlhood, her lived experiences, the places she’s cooked and dined in, but also in how she creates new layers and aspects of an ingredient, technique, or flavor that bears traces of its most essential form. You’ll find a body of endemic citruses, nuts, fruits, fish, heirloom vinegars—ingredients from Butuan, Pampanga, and all over, not lost, only returning, as a kind of gestural mark-making, to borrow art’s parlance.

It’s not a fusion, she asserts, though that would be the easy assumption. “You really can’t categorize it, because it’s my personal identity. It’s very difficult because I’m not cooking a concept. What matters in the experience is if you’re eating delicious food and you’re enjoying it, and that you taste everything, you experience everything,” she says. 

It’s precisely that philosophy that she brought to the dishes during her recent residency in Sage Bar at Makati Shangri-La, after taking leave as Metronome’s executive chef April last year. Together with her all-women team of five, they presented a menu that felt at once unassumingly personal yet entirely new, thanks to a rare dynamic that acknowledges, again and again, the value of collaboration and ownership. In her team are Joan Dolina (Sous-chef), Georgina Gorospe (Sous-chef), Bianca Marie Aragon (Pastry Chef), Danielle Tensuan (Pastry Commis Chef), and Reeya Monique Gloriani (Chef de Partie).

She continues to be the team’s vibrational center and stabilizing force but explains that it’s a team effort, “I trust them to uphold my standards, not because I’m breathing down their necks but because there is integrity in what they want for themselves. It’s them not being afraid to tell me if there’s something wrong with what I’m creating.” The choice to pair peach with durian, for instance, came from Aragon, joining the beignets, sablés, and brioche feuilletée served all through the residency’s run. 

Space is something women are still asked to negotiate, but Calo’s kitchen makes no such concessions. During pre-service, every woman has her mise en place, a French term which means “everything in its place,” where she gathers the components, arranges the tools, and completes the basic prep work. It’s a common method to ensure efficiency, consistency, and precision in the kitchen—a way of being before doing.

Sometimes, a Taylor Swift record will play in the background, as the young women exchange stories, like Tensuan and Aragon, who have their own little corner as the pastry duo of the team. Still, it’s a quieter kitchen, Calo tells me. “There isn’t a lot of,” she then proceeds to make grunts and noises, which I understand perfectly as the overly familiar chorus of male grousing. 

She also admits she isn’t the most charitable: “It’s not like my kitchen was the easiest kitchen. I push you hard because this is what I want, this is what I expect from you, and I’m not going to go down two notches because that’s all you can do. That’s unfair to me and to the other person. I know for a fact that these girls when they go somewhere else, they can cook with the best of them,” she says. 

Dish by dish, these women have become intimate with her ways in the kitchen: her discipline, her orderliness, her sincere urge to create a self-assured meal, informed by rigorous technique. A dual education, in both the art of life and the art of work, for young women in the cusp of their careers.

What’s next? Calo shares that a new restaurant is in the works, one that’s “more casual, more approachable, less restricting.” She claims she isn’t a storyteller. She cares less for the performance of elucidation, perhaps one reason why her craft remains desirous to her most loyal patrons. “Even when we eat in our tita’s house and it’s a whole fiesta, do they go around telling you the story of how they cooked it? No, but you’re enjoying it,” she tells me. 

Undergirding her entire craft is a regard for pleasure. Of ambience, and the ease of having a glass of wine with your meal. Of good conversations and the way the waitstaff drifts in the periphery, ready to take an emptied plate: cooking that’s meant to be enjoyed and relished completely. She’s at the helm now as she should be, though for those who follow her every endeavor, that’s nothing new. And the next move? It’s already set in her mise en place.

By ZEA ASIS. Portraits by COLIN DANCEL. Makeup by Patricia Acejo. Producer: Bianca Zaragoza. Sittings Editor: Patricia Villoria. Photography Assistant: Titus Madrideo. Shot on location at Studio by Manila Kitchens. Food images courtesy of Makati Shangri-La.