Donia, London: Fantastic Filipino food in the most soul-sucking part of the city

If you’re going through Carnaby Street hell, just keep going. Adobo will be your reward

They’ve renamed Carnaby Street. We’re supposed to call it “Carnaby” now. My cab driver said they’d reclassified it as a “quarter” so they could charge Carnaby Street rents in the less glamorous Soho side roads. Not, by any means, the most paranoid theory he expressed. Well, whatever they’ve done with the place, I think we can all agree it’s awful. It’s like a ride in a Soviet theme park, designed to convey the vacuity and decadence of western youth. It can only apparently be appreciated in mobs of 40, clad in identical puffa jackets, sharing two vapes and a litre vat of bubble tea.

Granted all the space in this magazine, I could not express the vileness of Kingly Court, the “dining destination” at the quarter’s joyless heart. I once had a temporary job as a security guard in a mall in North Carolina. I used to sit in the deserted food court in the small hours, entirely alone, wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. It was somehow a warmer and less soul-destroying place than Kingly Court. But the small clean room on the upper landing — light, bright and with whitewashed brick walls — is neutral and innocuous. Here is Donia, a small modern Filipino restaurant.

I’m not usually troubled by the acoustics of restaurants, but Donia’s are challenging. It’s a cruel and unusual battering with random fragments of unattenuated but enthusiastic food conversations. Probably what it’s like living inside Gregg Wallace’s head. I’d also like to express my undying enmity to the platoon of business bros at the next table whose knobs went all the way to 11 and were stuck on “transmit”. They obviously felt their squalid property transactions were “on a strictly need-to-know basis” but the bastards had decided we needed to know. There’s a special region of hell reserved for people like this. It’s basically them, me and an immersion blender for eternity.

The chicken offal skewer was easy to agree on and turned out to be half a dozen hearts on a stick with a dark, sticky sweet sauce. It was good, but I felt a little hard done by that they’d stayed entirely cardiac. I would gladly have extended at least into the hepatic or renal.

Adobo is regarded as a national dish of the Philippines — loved, celebrated and much debated. It’s a preparation of meat, poultry, fish or vegetables browned and then braised in vinegar and soy. The sour element is distinctive, unusual and stimulating. We Brits don’t use as much sour in our cooking as other cultures, and the effect on the palate can be every bit as transformative as the more familiar umami. Here, rather than a vast bowl of stew, they’ve made a smart little adobo of mushroom, which they’ve then used to make crisp fried croquetas. They were extraordinary, prompting me to reassess my life goals radically in favour of spending more time eating adobo.

We worry so much about eggs’ freshness here in the UK that we obsessively refrigerate them and panic when sell-by dates approach. The idea, therefore, of an egg brined for preservation is challenging to most of us. It calls to mind the pickled egg jar in the pub, only marginally less appetising than a pathology specimen. But we’re getting this catastrophically wrong. The Filipino way is to hard-boil and grate them on to a salad with chunks of fresh tomato. It looks like yellow snow, or what’s fashionably termed a “drift” of parmesan, but there’s no sulphurous egginess. There’s a very slight concentration of the yolk flavour and the salt picks it up further. Complex savouriness set off by a cool, crisp and neutral salad.

Kinilaw is a pickle of fresh fish in vinegar and citrus. In this case, the citrus is finger limes and the fish sea bream . . . but you guessed that. All fish in London at the moment seems to be sea bream. I’m not complaining, I just can’t work out if there can be any left in the sea. But all that fresh lightness was going to need a counterweight, and it came in the form of lechón.

Lechón is suckling pig, usually roasted whole with much effort spent over the crackling. The flesh is subtly flavoured and creamy, the skin a filigree matrix of gold, like the inside of a Crunchie bar. At Donia they serve just a piece, which by itself provoked moans of joy at the table, but it was as nothing beside The Astonishing Sauce. It was an extremely unprepossessing colour. What Farrow & Ball would probably call “Support Hose Beige” but it was made of puréed chicken livers, vinegar, soy and sugar. If you can imagine all the things you love about chicken liver parfait that elevate it beyond school-dinner liver. That. Poured over pig. This incarnation was also fired up with peppercorns. Shameless lily gilding that I can only endorse.

In the circumstances, it seemed just silly not to go the extra mile and order the fresh grilled half lobster, “ginataan”, humming with the scorched-shell redolence of a beach barbecue. It’s hard to do it justice. Imaging two alien xenomorphs wrestling naked in a drench of delicately fragranced coconut curry sauce. Lots of ferociously dangerous bits but strangely erotic.

The food at Donia was fantastic, new to me and a delightful revelation. Service was outstanding, and the wine list was smartly chosen to survive a firefight of new and unusual flavours.

If I could find a way, I’d like to be spirited into Donia, possibly through a back door and into the lift, wearing some kind of obscuring bag over my head so I didn’t register where I was. After that, all I’d need is a table away from the business bros and about a gallon of that lechón sauce.

Donia

2.14 Top Floor Kingly Court, Carnaby Street, London W1B 5PW

Starters: £3.50-£20

Mains: £22-£82

Sweets: £4.50-£12

Source: Financial Times

Remittances up by 2.7% in January

Cash Remittances from overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) rose by 2.7% year on year in January, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said.

Data from the BSP showed cash remittances coursed through banks increased by 2.7% to $2.836 billion in January from $2.762 billion in the same month last year.   

However, the amount of money sent home by migrant Filipinos was the lowest in two months or since $2.719 billion in November.

Month on month, the growth in cash remittances slowed to 2.7% from 3.8% in December. It was also the slowest pace of remittance growth since 2.6% posted in September.

“The growth in cash remittances in January 2024 was primarily due to increased receipts from both land- and sea-based workers,” the BSP said.

Land-based workers sent home $2.253 billion in January, up by 3.1% from $2.186 billion in the same month last year.

Remittances from sea-based OFWs grew by 1.1% to $582 million in January from $575.7 million a year earlier.

The BSP said that inflows from the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Singapore mainly contributed to the growth in remittances during the month.

Nearly half (41.8%) of total remittances came from OFWs in the United States. This was followed by Singapore (7.3%), Saudi Arabia (6%), Japan (5.8%), the United Kingdom (4.8%), and the UAE (3.3%).

Remittances from the top 10 countries accounted for 80% of overall remittances in January.

Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. Chief Economist Michael L. Ricafort said that growth in remittances, despite being slower than a year ago, remained a “bright spot” for the economy.

“Further reopening of the economy towards greater normalcy also led to increased spending with some pent-up demand or even some revenge spending by OFW families and dependents,” he said.

Mr. Ricafort noted that remittance growth eased in January from December due to seasonality factors. December is typically when cash remittances are the highest as OFWs send home more money for their families during the holidays.

Mr. Ricafort said remittances could continue to post modest growth for the rest of the year as OFW families “still need to cope with relatively higher prices locally that would require the sending of more remittances.”

Inflation accelerated for the first time in five months in February to 3.4% from 2.8% in January.

For the first two months of 2024, headline inflation averaged 3.1%. This year, the BSP expects inflation to average 3.6%.

“Lack of a global downturn in the developed markets despite the persistent drag of high interest rates and the preference of young, mobile Filipino workers to work offshore because of better compensation  and other career opportunities in the post-pandemic period support our forecasts of OFW remittances up by 3% in 2024 and by 2.8% in 2025,” Union Bank of the Philippines, Inc. Chief Economist Ruben Carlo O. Asuncion said.

The BSP expects remittances to grow by 3% this year and next year.

Mr. Asuncion said the annual remittance forecasts assume quarterly remittance flows would likely surpass $8 billion every quarter, “leading to more than $9 billion in the fourth quarter.”

Meanwhile, BSP data also showed that personal remittances, which contain inflows in kind, increased by 2.7% to $3.153 billion in January from $3.071 billion in the same month a year ago.

“The increase in personal remittances in January 2024 was driven by increased remittances from land-based workers with work contracts of one year or more and sea- and land-based workers with work contracts of less than one year,” the BSP added.

In 2023, cash remittances hit a record-high $33.491 billion, up by 2.9% year on year.

However, this fell short of the BSP’s 3% estimate and was slower than the 3.6% expansion in 2022.

Source: Business World

PHL to attract int’l real estate investors, occupiers

The Philippines is emerging as an attractive destination for international real estate investors and occupiers, buoyed by its positive growth outlook, according to real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield.

“Southeast Asia’s comparatively strong GDP (gross domestic product) forecast has made it a bright spot in the global economy,” Cushman & Wakefield’s Head of Global Occupier Services for Asia-Pacific Cameron Ahrens said in a statement last week.

The firm added that the growing acceptance of new working styles combined with the cost constraints of a higher interest rate environment bodes well for lower-cost and emerging markets in the region.

“Manila also has a booming office sector thanks to its significant proportion of shared service centers, or business process outsourcing offices,” Mr. Ahrens said.

Moody’s Analytics expects the Philippine economy to expand by 5.8% this year, driven by robust demand for electronics that could catalyze export growth across the Asia-Pacific region. The country is also projected to be the third-fastest-growing economy in the region for the year.

Mr. Ahrens noted that the higher interest rate environment and broader macroeconomic climate meant that global occupiers, including multinational companies, continued to take a cautious approach to costs.

“In the current environment, we are seeing companies take a more considered approach to expenditure, and this extends to expanding headcount. They are being very strategic about where they want to grow their headcount and where they want to grow their business,” he said.

He added that globally, shared service offices and global capability centers are expected to continue seeing growth as multinationals increasingly accept that remote working is both possible and sustainable.

“During and following the pandemic, the Great Resignation and the ensuing War for Talent helped to accelerate the growth of this practice as employers looked to new and often lower-cost markets to fill vacancies and grow their headcount,” he said.

“Manila’s deep, English-speaking talent pool and its established reputation as a business process outsourcing market positions it as a key beneficiary,” he added.

Although the region shows promise, Cushman & Wakefield highlighted lingering downside risks. These include reduced demand from China, a key export market for Southeast Asia; ongoing geopolitical tensions between China and the United States; and persistent albeit gradually improving inflation across the region.

Source: Business World