by Veronica Blanco
Q: Who are you and what do you do?
Nesly Mayor, 25 y/o, co-owner and head chef at Maymar Chesapeake, Filipino restaurant.
Q: Why Filipino Food?
Partly because I was born into it. I think like all things (most things in our lives), we don’t necessarily have as much choice or sovereignty/autonomy as we think we do. Filipino chose me. And I’m honestly thankful that it did bc at first, I didn’t. I went through a period of feeling stagnant and boring. But after I got through my edgy teen chef years, I fell in love with it– the cuisine, the history behind it, its flavors, etc.
Q: How did you start?
As a chef: Like I said earlier, I think it was just like a given passion to me. I remember when I was...man, like 7 or 8. My mom would put a little step stool in front of the cooking range at home because she's short. But I started using that to look over what she was doing, just watching and observing. It all started with me waking up and cooking breakfast for myself or with my cousin for our family. It started at a really young age. It was my first passion.
As a Filipino chef: I think it started with learning how to scramble eggs and cook corn beef, spam, and other stuff…which are inherently Filipino-American dishes. I think it was my dad’s adobo that really made me realize how much I liked the food that I specifically made at home/found at home, not at school or restaurants. Looking back at it, I liked how my dad made his adobo, even though he made it kind of differently. Fistfuls of black peppercorns and cut potatoes. I think potatoes were added to stretch out the meat, since we lived well below our means growing up in Ewa beach and Norfolk.
Q: Do you consider yourself a Filipino chef or a Filipino American chef?
I’d have to say Filipino-American. I feel like I’d be lying otherwise.
Q: Why is that?
A lot of my influences are from the PI and my older relatives, but I don’t have necessarily the same experiences and history with the food that my forefathers had. And because of that, I’ve put my own twist into our [Filipino] cooking. And I don’t honestly mind that.
Q: Why did you start selling food?
The restaurant started because my aunt and my uncle realized that there were no Filipino restaurants in the 757. Until the 90s, they started the first turo-turo restaurant called Maymar, a combination of their last names [Mayor & Marisigan]. And they started selling food to help supply money to the family and stream income. They didn’t know much, but what they did know was that their food was delicious and their culture’s cuisine is good.
I started selling food because I wanted to keep up the legacy my family established. They did it out of economic constraints and needing to provide, but I saw it as a cultural touchstone to our past and a legacy to be passed down and upheld.
Q: Why is this [Filipino food] important to you?
I think it’s because it holds so much, you know, space in my life.
Q: Can you define that [space in your life]?
The flavors and the food itself are just bridges. They’re great and they taste awesome. But I think why they’re so important to me is because when I go back into my memories and when I think about the future, it’s because of that food. It’s because that food is gonna be at the center of where my family and my friends create moments together. Honestly, the food could’ve been anything. I could’ve lived off of boiled carrots my entire life and I wouldn’t give a damn. It’s the people that are connected to it and the amount of love and affection that I felt in proximity to the food. It’s about the memories that were shared because of it. And it’s so strange that the smell of something can really bring you back to a time of comfort, a time of mourning, and a time of celebration. It kind of snaps you back into that moment. And that’s why Filipino food is so important to me because that’s the food that will make those memories, that will make those moments. It could’ve been any type of food, but for me it’s Filipino Food, and I’m so happy that it is. Dang. I don’t really reflect on this stuff.
"What you’re asking about is my identity and I barely had anything to do with it. I didn’t choose my name, my race, the family I was born into, or even the type of food that we ate. But man, am I floored, am I thankful that it is what it is."
*cries in Tagalog*
Q: What do people say about your food?
You know what I hear a lot? “I’ve never tasted anything like this before.” And after that, which is a completely neutral statement, but then they keep eating it which is pretty crazy. Most times when people have no experience with something, they’re…hmm afraid of what they don’t know. They like the regular, their day-to-day. There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t have a person come in and say, “This is my first time having Filipino food and it’s so good.” That doesn’t necessarily talk up my skill as a chef, because it’s honestly what’s been handed down, what’s been given to us, and staying faithful to those things and tweaking the food where it needs to be tweaked.
Q: How is your food different from other local Filipino restaurants?
After going to culinary school and learning recipes from the old-heads at the first incarnation of Maymar at Lila Lane in Virginia Beach, I kind of just synthesized some of the techniques that I learned with balancing the flavor profiles of the recipes that my relatives gave me.
Q: Can you give me an example of this?
One really easy adjustment I’ve made was starting our sinigang in cold water. It’s not the most groundbreaking change, but starting with cold water to draw out the impurities from the pork is an important step when making a broth that you’d like a clear flavor from. The aunties in the back were just dumping pork shoulder into really hot boiling water because it’s quicker to cook. However, what goes wrong is that you’ll end up with a cloudy soup that won’t have as good of a pork flavor to it when you’re done. It’s a simple technique I learned the second week of cooking school, and they just didn’t know it.
Q: What does authenticity mean?
I think the term “authentic” is thrown around a lot. Specifically for Filipinos, it’s a touch more complicated. Its meaning can be skewed in different ways. And to me it doesn’t hold as much weight as people value it as.
Q: What do you think about your food becoming trendy?
I’m not mad about it. I think we had it a long time coming. Personally, I’m just happy it’s getting the respect that I think it deserves on the American dinner table. I think people who try to hide away cuisine in fear of it becoming gentrified is kind of a disservice. I don’t think they have a long view of how food can evolve, especially if people are scared of Filipino food getting muddied or twisted. It’s really stupid because that’s kind of our whole schtick, you know what I mean? Filipinos are barely their own culture. We’re an amalgam of 300+ years of Spanish slavery, invasions with the Chinese, Dutch, British, and Japanese, and then American colonization and occupation, which is it’s own can of worms.
"Our culture and our food are mixed bags and melting pots from other people. To have it mix more and evolve even further is not a bad thing, but just part of the human experience. I will not rest until lumpia is an American food that’s as American as pizza."
Make sure you check out Maymar’s take on Filipino cuisine in person by visiting Nesly and his team at Maymar Filipino Restaurant at 805 N. Battlefield Blvd, Chesapeake, VA.
If you can’t make it, then check them out with your eyes @maymareats (Instagram, Twitter) and at fb.com/maymareats (Facebook).
You can also follow him on his own personal journey @nestlemahyour (Instagram).