Back home in Vancouver, I did what every sugary motivational image told me to do and followed what truly interested me, so I became a sommelier instead of finishing university: perhaps my way of taking an alcoholic stress response all the way into a career (which I honestly don’t regret). You might call it a feeling of unsettling equilibrium, privileged restlessness, or the beginning of every stupid film where the main character needs a change in their life, but there was this prickle that rubbed against my insides every time the possibility of diving into the deep end – of whatever else – presented itself. Immigrants like my parents may have this survival instinct to plant themselves in a city that they can call home, but as a queer child of immigrants getting to know himself, I needed something else that wasn’t where I was, no matter how great everyone I met made it out to be. 2016 was that year.
I knew San Francisco was queer, and I knew California had its fair share of Filipinos, but I didn’t really know what that meant for me. I will say that I told everyone that I watched HBO’s Silicon Valley before moving here in order to jokingly give myself a taste of what tech life was like – what no one told me was that it was hardly parody.
The first bits of any startup timeline mean that free time isn’t really a thing, so I remember not hesitating to schedule a Tinder date the moment a pocket of time made itself available to me: anything, really, to spend time outside of the converted garage facsimile of an apartment with barely a mattress or lighting. One of these particular first dates almost seemed like a scrambled sign: grabbing lunch with a Filipino nurse before my first visit to San Francisco’s gaybourhood, the Castro. We “accidentally” bumped into his family at the Japan Center after sushi, and he did nothing but watch me during several rounds of drinks at the Castro bars since he was driving. Responsible – I’ll give him that. But why was my first drink in the Castro at Badlands while the sun was still out and the dance floor still closed off?! Considering following dates with other people during the next few years, it definitely could’ve been worse, but at least my first drink in the Castro was one I promised an ex-San Franciscan friend I would have. (Nothing exciting: just a cranberry vodka. I don’t remember why.)
Meeting with some university friends within that first month almost seemed like a video game checkpoint – we met over beers at the Monk’s Kettle in the Mission and caught up: I had co-founded a startup, some of us moved into tech positions at places like Google, and some of us decided to continue in academia. During our hangout I mentally recall that we were all part of this challenging and integrated science program in our first year of university, three of the four midterms which I failed in the first term, and where I chose to do a final project on muffins rather than other chosen topics like prime numbers or cancer research. I felt like a fluke, but I didn’t care, especially considering that another final research project of mine was the mathematics of homosexuality. A little dicey, now that I look back at that choice, but a clear indication that I was inadvertently hiding my heart behind my brain.
Throughout the next year, weeknights and weekends were an equal blur of additional startup assignments and the city’s distractions, from tinkering with formulations to reading books on San Francisco’s queer history (the first of these books which were gifts from a first date-turned-best friend); from filling spreadsheets to crying during a film on Harvey Milk; from preparing for investor meetings to needing a space to change into my Folsom outfit.
As someone not from here, I understand that it’s important for native voices to sing their laments before mine, but as I listen to the version of “San Francisco” featured in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, I can’t help but picture someone who lived here decades before and somehow found themself transported to the present and is mourning its changes while singing an ode to what beautiful parts are left. As with a physical moving of a home, a mental move also involves bringing what’s important, leaving behind what isn’t, throwing out what you thought was important, and replacing what you might’ve thrown away prematurely.
I guess I didn’t realize I would grow so much.
I knew that longganisa was one of the seven flavours I had to choose to create a snapshot of the unique and prevalent flavours found throughout the Philippines – along with dishes like tocino, a sweetish pork belly dish with an adjacent flavour profile, I couldn’t not include these nostalgic foods I grew up with. Different countries have different types of sausage, and a sommelier friend of mine from Chile curiously asked what the differences were between my Filipino longganisa and his Chilean longaniza – I haven’t had the latter, but I can say that compared to other sausages, I find the Filipino version to be distinctly sweet, spicy, and fruity, with variants across the archipelago.
Surprisingly – or unsurprisingly – none of the thirteen wines I chose to pair with the seven Filipino flavours really created any full-fledged HD fireworks with the longganisa: a handful were flat, and some were okay at best, with the longganisa always finding a part of the wine to argue with. When it came time to zoom into one particular pairing for this, I had to remove myself from the present and place myself in a Matrix-like void with all of the beverages in the world at my disposal. If I had a plate of longganisa in front of me, what would I choose to materialize in my glass? Coke kept being the right answer, as I pictured myself as a kid, the sweetness meeting sweetness and the bubbles providing biting refreshment. I hardly drink soda, bar diet versions with alcohol in it, but along with the Lambrusco in my experiment – which I wish could’ve been sweeter – my mind went somewhere else. Why stick to wine?
(Also: clock me for using Canadian spellings for words but saying “soda”. Oh no. Relevant, though???)
In a culinary scenario I am fully not a big sausage person, but as I fry up the two types that I procured at the supermarket, the smell fills the house with nostalgia and I realize it’s been years since I’ve had longganisa. The longer and thinner chicken longganisa is a little more subtle, but the shorter and plumper pork longganisa is a little more meaty, generous, and sweet. My internal Filipino rhythm couldn’t help but have a side of chopped tomatoes doused in fish sauce, which provides a tangy response to the sausage – I was curious to see if it would jive with the pairing as well.
Brouweij Boon 2016 Boon Framboise Lambic (Belgium) 375mL. Sep 2020. $10 USD.
Lovely faded ruby hue. A mix of fresh and dried raspberries, though one could count many more of the latter. Soft taps of gentle mousse on the palate that quickly fades away into a mere memory of sourness rather than a shock wave. Not too sweet at all, and very well balanced. Expected either a little more sweetness or sourness out of this, though, but it fits the bill.
Part of me worried that the lambic would be too saccharine, but it was just sweet enough to hold its own on the debate stage. Part of me even expected more sweetness and power from it, which actually would’ve been better – I would even go further as to suggest a sweeter sparkling red wine in the vein of a Brachetto d’Acqui or an even fruitier berry-centric beer, like the raspberry beer by Samuel Smith. That being said, I could’ve sworn there were more of these wines or beers out in the wild, but I’ve had difficulty getting my hands on them – perhaps the seemingly blatant availability of these fruity drinks during my pre-San Francisco years were God’s way of telling me to come out of the closet already.
Oh, sausage.