Even if online food delivery is heaven-sent, people can only take so much of the usual dishes and desserts sold on social media before these staples start coming out of their ears. This is where longtime cook Betsy Ignacio of Bleaumont European Cuisine comes in.
By Alex Y. Vergara
Whoever hasn’t sampled baked sushi or ube pan de sal by now is probably living under a rock or exiled somewhere in Mars. Because of the pandemic, not a few people have been inspired to put their long-held cooking talents on display. Some, to their amazement, have discovered and were able to summon their inner chefs, as they whip up various dishes and baked goodies from their respective kitchens.
In due time, with restaurants either closed or still limited to a few tables and takeout orders, budding entrepreneurs with a knack for cooking started to fill the void by offering their dishes to quarantined communities. A growing number of Filipino families, in turn, discovered and began embracing the convenience and safety of buying ready-to-eat food delivered to them right at their doorsteps by various online suppliers.
But even if such a life-saving concept is heaven-sent, people can only have so much of the usual dishes and desserts peddled on social media before these online staples start coming out of their ears. This is where longtime cook Betsy Ignacio of Bleaumont European Cuisine comes in.
Chicken a la hotel
In lieu of fad dishes, or classic Filipino staples such as menudo, adobo and caldereta, Betsy, through her recently launched food venture, is offering hotel-style continental dishes—from seared salmon with roasted peppers in Alfredo sauce to various Mediterranean-style pizza and pasta dishes, including ziti with stewed tomatoes, chicken Alfredo penne and eggplant parmigiana pizza —delivered to you.
She could have easily joined the fray by coming up with her own versions of, say, kare-kare, laing, or even binagoongang baboy, but Betsy wanted to offer the public something different, something more unique based on her own experience and demands as a diner.
“If you’ve noticed, the online market is already saturated either with items that are trending or what we commonly cook at home,” the mother of three young adults says through email.
Instead of thinking like a typical businessperson by coming up with a mindless menu with a built-in clientele, she put herself in the diner’s shoes by offering him or her “something different, but still familiar.” That was when she decided on focusing on well-loved hotel dishes that not too many Filipino families cook and serve at home.
“Bleaumont’s cuisine is modern European, an evolution from classic dishes many of us have become familiar with,” she continues. “At the same time, I’d like to believe that I’m also offering people something adventurous without alienating the beginner’s palate.”
Betsy’s other main dishes, which all come either in solo serving or good for four people, include pan-seared halibut, seared Chilean sea bass, schublig with caramelized onions and mashed potatoes, and the classic fish and chips.
Wine pairing
European food, of course, won’t be complete without pairing them with the proper wines.
Betsy, through her partnership with Denny Wang, CEO of Yats Wine Cellars, has gone the extra mile to pair her dishes with specific French and New World wines. Yes, customers have the option to order their wines from her with their meals, as Bleaumont also delivers by the bottle.
She may not have worked for a five-star hotel or trained under some of the country’s best chefs, but years of cooking for family gatherings and hosting small groups of friends over for dinner have trained Betsy well.
“Every year, I would plan the menu for my family’s annual Christmas Eve party,” she says. “Whenever my friends and I have get-togethers, I always end up hosting such events at their request. They say they enjoy my cooking.”
Five years ago, after finishing several business courses online, Betsy was able to develop a business plan for a restaurant intended for diners with special dietary requirements. Just when she was about to embark on putting up such a place, the pandemic hit, immediately scuttling her plans.
With various degrees of community quarantine coming in the heels of a three-month-long Luzon-wide lockdown, opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant was out of the question.
And if she were to go online, Betsy thought, and rightly so, that catering to people, say, with diabetes or hypertension by serving them special meals would be too limiting. She decided to do the next best thing: offer diners healthy and hopefully tasty takes on European cuisine.
Appetizing but healthy
“I pick out familiar dishes that are not only identifiable to Filipinos, but are also appetizing to them,” she shares. “For example, instead of offering customers the usual thin or thick crust pizza, I made mine healthier by adding eggplant. By using certain ingredients made in the dish’s country of origin, its taste and authenticity are ensured.”
Thankfully, the pandemic has yet to cut off the supply of such authentic imported ingredients Betsy needs to realize her vision. Her ziti with stewed tomatoes, for example, uses only pasta, marinara sauce and cherry tomato vines from Italy. Meanwhile, the cold cuts served with cheeses in her antipasto dish are mostly sourced all the way from Germany.
“My personal favorite is the Chilean sea bass with spinach and tomatoes,” she shares. “I also love ziti with stewed tomatoes as well as the antipasto.” If there’s one fruit she can’t probably live without, it’s the tomato (well, it’s a fruit that, for some reason, is considered by nutritionists a vegetable).
“For me, the best tomatoes should be sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory,” says Betsy. “You’ll notice that most of Bleaumont’s dishes either have tomatoes in them as one of their ingredients or come with a tomato-based sauce.”
To further hone and fine-tune her cooking, she recently enrolled in a MasterClass series under celebrity chefs Gordon Ramsay, Wolfgang Puck, Thomas Keller and Alice Waters. Under Gordon, Betsey learned how to cook certain restaurant recipes at home, while Thomas shared with her cooking techniques involving such basic ingredients as vegetables, pasta and eggs.
She’s also getting by with a little help from her friends. Betsy, for instance, tapped Albert Daniel Rañada and Ruth Ding to photograph her dishes, while Patty Lucero and Martina Ignacio did the graphic arts. A niece who’s into marketing helped Betsy write Bleaumont’s copies on social media.
Finally, the name
Before the pandemic hit, Betsy also regularly dined out with family and friends at various hotels. As a foodie, she knows how it feels to be deprived of certain dishes only hotel chefs trained in the art of French and Italian cooking could probably give justice to.
It was during one of her visits to a hotel in Makati that the name for her future online food venture came about. She had already settled on “bleu,” which, she says, means the number eight in Chaldean numerology. Some friends also happen to call her Blu. But the one-syllable name sounded incomplete and too generic.
“The ‘mont’ part came while I was with friends at Fairmont Hotel,” she shares. “Fairmont, mont, Bleaumont…that’s it! Bleaumont sounded good to me.” Call it fate or coincidence, but this big fan of hotel food found the final piece of the puzzle—the future name of her first-ever food business—in, of all places, a hotel.
To order, contact Betsy Ignacio through Bleaumont’s Facebook page or Instagram account (bleaumontph). You can also text her at +63.995.230.1130.