Just Savour Life
I’m Jacob Ung, and Just Savour Life is where I introduce you to restaurants worth trying, bars worth settling into, events worth turning up for, and places worth the trip — and, sometimes along the way, something worth thinking about. Though the best recommendation I can give isn’t a write-up at all. It’s a table booked for Thursday and a text asking if you’re free.
The food is the excuse.
“Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of … your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma.”
— Anthony Bourdain
Every meal I've cared about turned out to be a way into something else. You sit down for the dish and you leave knowing how people here actually live — what they're proud of, what they had to make do with, who gets fed first. Ask a cook why it's made this way and not that way and the answer comes back about geography, or money, or a grandmother, or a war. Very few of those answers are about food.
It runs the other way, too. Cooking for people is the closest I get to saying something I may not be good at saying out loud. I'm not a chef and won't pretend otherwise — I've been near enough kitchens to know what that job actually entails. But I'll give a whole day to a meal for people I love and count it the best day of the week. It's the only thing I do that takes all five senses at once, which is why it's the only thing that makes the rest of my head go quiet.
Good company makes food taste better.
“The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.”
— Anthony Bourdain
That isn't sentiment. It's just true, and anyone who eats out honestly knows it. The best meal of my life was not the best food I've eaten, and it isn't close.
Which is why I pay as much attention to hospitality as to what's on the plate. Service is meeting the expectation you already paid for. Hospitality is everything past that — being read correctly, being looked after by someone who actually wanted to. A dining room is not a room. It's the people in it, on both sides of the pass.
And it does something to us. Put food between two people and their defences come down — you learn more across a table in one evening than in a year of meetings. It's where we celebrate and where we grieve, where we welcome someone and where we say goodbye. Half of what gets said at a good table couldn't be said anywhere else. That isn't the food's doing. But it doesn't happen without it.
I've never had exactly one culture to be from.
Chinese by ancestry, born in the Philippines, raised in Canada — and not done with any of them. Grow up like that and you learn early that there's no single correct way to do dinner — and that most arguments about authenticity are really arguments about who got there first.
It's also why I travel the way I do. Seven continents, sixty-odd countries, a few new ones every year — but I've never been interested in collecting them. The table is where I start, not where I stop: how people dress, how they drive, what they argue about, what a Sunday looks like, which building they're proud of and which one they'd rather you didn't photograph.
Some of the best hours I've spent abroad had nothing to do with a restaurant — a market at opening, a bar with no menu, a long drive to somewhere a stranger swore was worth it. Those end up here too. I'd rather be somewhere nobody is performing for visitors, and be told I've ordered wrong.
In 2013 I met my hero in a Thai restaurant in Las Vegas.
There was a notice taped to the door: by eating here tonight, you agree to appear on camera. It didn't say what was being filmed, or who would be in it. A few courses into our own meal, Anthony Bourdain walked in and sat down two tables away. I'm somewhere in the background of that episode — season three, episode two — holding up my phone to show my friend I'd finally worked out who he was eating with. Sorry, Chef Jet Tila.
At the end of the night he came over to thank us for staying. He asked where I was from. Vancouver, I said, and he called it underrated — all the right ingredients and none of the reputation. When I said I was originally from the Philippines, he had considerably more to say, most of it unprintable and all of it in praise of Lechon, our roasted suckling pig.
I won't pretend it was a conversation that changed my life; he'd already done that from a distance. Bourdain's position was that the people at the table are more interesting than what's on it, that you should shut up and eat what you're given, and that being a guest carries obligations. He praised the kitchen too, but separately, and on its own terms. I've never found a better way to travel, or to eat.
It's also why I keep studying. I've done the WSET courses in wine and spirits, and in sake — not so I can tell you what to drink, but because I wanted to understand what I was drinking. I don't expect to ever be finished learning.
This isn't entirely new.
Back in 2012 I ran a blog called Premeditated Gluttony. It wasn't only fine dining — it was whatever I happened to be eating, which was most things. A few of those write-ups still hold up, and they'll reappear here under From the Archives: revisited, not reposted.
That period built a network of chefs, restaurateurs, and people across the industry I’m still close with, and it eventually pulled me further in. I’m now COO of the Chinese Restaurant Awards, after two years as one of its taste advisors.
One rule has never changed: nothing here is written, recommended or endorsed because someone paid for it or picked up the bill. I've always accepted invitations — I'd rather be at the table than not — and being hosted has simply never been what puts a place on this site. When a piece does come out of a hosted visit, when a course arrives that I didn't order, or when something is ever sponsored, it says so at the top: every time, without being asked.
I'm not a critic, and it's not something I ever want to be. There's no shortage of people ready to take a place apart — a phone and a grievance is all it takes now. What's in shorter supply is someone willing to tell you where to go, and why it's worth your evening. So this is a recommendation, not a verdict. When somewhere doesn't land, it doesn't appear here. The people who run it would rather hear it from me directly — and that's where it goes.
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New pieces, plus what’s on my table next. Every few weeks.
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