So sorry you were unsatisfied with your visit to Zubuchon. My apologies for this late reply, I just recently revisited the blog after a month’s hiatus.

It is unusual but certainly not impossible that your portion of lechon was not up to standard, but we do pride ourselves in creating and serving our lechon in as best a manner as we can. Perhaps you will consider another try and if I am around, allow me to join you and to buy you the replacement meal so that you can tell me face to face where it is not to your satisfaction. I would happily spring for a kilo of the other top 3 brands in Cebu so you can conduct a comparison taste test. It will not offend me if you prefer other brands, some of them are quite tasty. And people themselves have different preferences.

As to your claim that Cebuanos are avoiding Zubuchon, that is your opinion, and you are, quite simply, factually wrong. We continue to have over a thousand customers a day at our restaurant branches, and 70-80% of our guests are indeed Cebuano, with tourists from elsewhere in the Philippines making up 20-25% of our guests and foreign tourists a percent or two. Over 70% of our clients are repeat clients, with an estimated 20% that have dined with us/ or purchased our lechon at least 10 times since we opened. At least that is what our internal surveys tell us. And I would put more credence in those surveys than the opinion of just one person, credibility wise. And over the past 4.5 years, our customer base has grown steadily from month to month, as our VAT payments quite clearly indicate (probably placing us at the TOP of the list of lechon purveyors in Cebu that remit taxes to the Philippine government).

If other preparations for roast pig are your preference, I can certainly point you in the direction of several other well-known purveyors in Cebu. The vast majority of them use significant amounts of MSG (sometimes up to a cup per pig) as a stuffing ingredient and brush their skins with soy sauce to achieve the burnished look. Neither MSG nor soy sauce were popular for the first 600+ years of the roasting of pigs on the island of Cebu, so I certainly wouldn’t consider the addition of a new herb or two like rosemary and thyme to be so off the path as to not be considered. You may not be aware, but lechons from Carcar, in the south of Cebu, are stuffed with epazote, an obscure mexican herb that looks a bit like marijuana and which came over with Mexican sailors during the Galleon trade from 1650-1850 or so. Epazote only features in dishes in Ilocos, Cavite and Carcar, the three major stops of the galleons to the islands. And they have been used for hundreds of years. Surely that shouldn’t strike you as being icky, or at least, not as icky as MSG and soy sauce…

Best regards,

Marketman

Do a personal survey of your lechon, most Cebuanos nowadays avoid it.

On color:
It’s the commercial hijacking of our primate brain. It’s hardwired. We’re all descended from successful primates which has a preference for red/orange/yellow stuffs; e.i. ripe/more nutritious fruits, that gave them an edge on their survival.

Also:
https://www.thekitchn.com/outsmart-food-label-colors-while-you-shop-tips-from-the-kitchn-208689

and a research paper for the scholarly: :D
https://udel.edu/~rworley/e412/Psyc_of_color_final_paper.pdf

That is why “tokneneng” and other fried/barbecued street foods are dyed orange/red.

:D

P.S. As an interesting point of comparison, check out my old post on an order of lechon from El Botin, in Madrid, supposedly the OLDEST RUNNING RESTAURANT in the WORLD at 290 years since it opened, and note the color of their lechon skin in the photos. They use ovens rather than a rotisserie, but the hue of their skin is more golden, not reddish dark brown. The same goes for say Chinese roast pork in China, HK or Singapore, that have the same light golden color. And finally, if you happen to ask your grandparents about lechons made in their day (say 1960’s and before)… they would probably have to say that they were not the intensely reddish dark brown color so commonly seen today.

Our methods for cooking a lechon are detailed in a series of posts called the “lechon chronicles”… just in case you wanted a more detailed and complicated take on a home-cooked lechon…

httpss://ph.video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=A2KIo9zBiylWAH4AkFheIYpQ;_ylu=X3oDMTBzZzJoNGtoBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDdmlkBHZ0aWQDBGdwb3MDMTY-?p=How+Much+Sugar+In+Coke&vid=a12c8a10fc2f42aea6446bb004b5376d&turl=https%3A%2F%2Ftse4.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DWN.EvzIJSQnDAlpHgtTCwCxPg%26pid%3D15.1%26h%3D168%26w%3D300%26c%3D7%26rs%3D1&rurl=httpss%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DOBzvN9FLx4Q&tit=Coca+Cola+vs+Coca+Cola+Zero+-+Sugar+Experiment&c=15&h=168&w=300&l=126&sigr=11bqli9d9&sigt=11ememguf&sigi=12lr5e9b6&age=1410974525&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Av&fr=ipad&tt=b