The lovely chef, for what it’s worth, is fairly self-deprecating, an agile conversationalist, and seems to exude a kind of natural warmth and exuberance. Fresh from winning a pageant that flew her to the Cannes Film Festival, Alexandra Rocha is out to change the way you look at Manila’s pretty young things. Nicolas Lacson understands Xandra’s appeal and tells us why she’s one to go beyond the shallows of seasonal hype

She sits across me, and I swear, she must be holding her breath.

Holding it in because, to some degree, this cover starring Xandra Rocha, radiant and bikini-bottomed, required parental approval. Well, sort of.

The scene is a humid Saturday afternoon, just a little past two, at the Rocha apartment, which is cozy and air-conditioned. Xandra sits at the dining room table with her white MacBook splayed open, fingers on the track pad, flicking through her desktop. Her eyes—yes, we begin here, as typical as that sounds—are transfixed on screen, competing with the monitor’s glow. In moments of intense concentration, they flicker to life in a color difficult to find the vocabulary for. She will look at you and you in turn will have to grapple with its similarity to light, butter, cider, champagne. Oh she’s heard it trillions of times, but say it anyway, say it. Spill out that drunken utterance, sing out that toothy compliment, and its countless variations. You have beautiful eyes.

It still elicits a blush. “It’s still flattering every time,” she says. “It’s not like, ‘ugh, I’ve heard that before.’ It’s really more like, ‘thank you,’ and I genuinely feel flattered.” And then, for a moment, the world turns again, spins on its axis (or is it the effect of Xandra?), and the light streaming into the room changes and suddenly her eyes strike me as golden, blond—and well, you know what they say. Blondes do have a hell of a lot more fun.

And yet there she sits, across me, holding her breath, because there is her father, actor and scriptwriter Eddie Rocha, imperious and looming behind her, his spectacles perched precariously on his nose—I get the feeling that Xandra needs, at the very least, his buy-in. “It’s not for me to approve,” he says. “She’s of age.” But I can tell that, to Xandra (nervous or excited?), it matters what he thinks. So together, they skim through JPEGs of her recently concluded photo shoot for Rogue, held on the shores of Tali, beaches besieged by Xandra, suntanned and sultry, her wavy brown hair untamed, the boldness of her facial features a physical reflection of what she calls her cocktail lineage of French, Filipino (Bicolano, specifically), Spanish, Chinese, and Italian. Also, notably, the major world cuisines.

Xandra is disarmingly easy to talk to, and it is actually while talking that she appears to be most in her element—articulate, eloquent, intelligent, and gracious.

Troops have rallied to support her during this moment of judgement: Editor-in-Chief Jose Mari Ugarte, his wife Rita, his father-in-law, Mari, and myself. They utter her name in the same reverent breath as Demi’s. Comparisons to the perfect Greek symmetry of Jennifer Aniston, to the sultry fullness of the Brazilian stunner Adriana Lima, are also extended. I sneak a glance at Don Eddie. “She keeps saying that she doesn’t photograph well,” he states, with a natural, just-being-a-dad curtness. “But the truth is she just hasn’t been photographed by the right person.” Is that a signal for her to sigh in relief? At least to me, in the flesh or in high resolution, the sight of Xandra on shore, whether elegantly or barely clothed, would cause raiding fleets to sink and swim.

Because what father would not be protective with a daughter like Xandra? “Oh gosh,” she explains to me later on, when the din has died down and the cover at least implicitly consented to. “They were really nervous at first. We were looking through the previous Rogue magazines and I love Rogue, first of all, so I was really flattered when they asked me to do it. When I was showing my mom the issues, I was like, ‘Oh Lord, oh Lord, how’s she going to take it?’ So when she was looking at the pictures, she goes, ‘You know, I don’t know ha . . . it’s very . . . suggestive.” Then there was her boyfriend, whom she teased by dropping the bomb that the shoot would be a little more risqué than usual, one that called for her to appear nude “like this,” she says, laughing and miming the immortal supermodel pose of forearm-atop-chest. And if you are a fool, like me, the way Xandra playfully utters “suggestive” or “risqué” is sufficient to put ideas in your head.

The thing is, it’s not something she would probably do. Too classy, this chick. But neither can you ignore the fact that Xandra, a mere 22, stands on the cusp of adulthood and sometimes being of age means wanting to toe the line, even just a little bit: “I was like, well, mom, what can I do? I’m 22 and . . . ” Xandra says, trailing off, leaving her sentence unfinished, a suspenseful fill in the blanks. Torn between coming of age and remaining the baby of the family, this is the conflict that Xandra Rocha lives with.

And yet there she sits, across me, holding her breath, because there is her father, imperious and looming, his spectacles perched precariously on his nose.

Mostly, like I said, it has something to do with Xandra’s position in a family of four siblings, but also a family of strong, newsworthy personalities—her father, the outspoken actor, her older sister miraculously rescued from sea many years ago, and so on. The self-confessed baby of the family, she admits to feeling a bit sheltered and being zealously protected by her kin. “I have to say that since I’m the youngest, I was always sort of scared to jump into things. I was always like, I don’t know how to do it, what do I do? But when I started getting older, I told myself I just have to jump into things. Just do it.”

Consider Pinkerton, her own homemade ice cream business, her first hop into the fray. The business happens to be an offshoot of Xandra’s being immensely passionate about food. “I love to eat!” she laughs with a little guilt and a lot of gusto. “A lot of times I go out and people get shocked because I’ll order a steak, I’ll have salad, and, yeah, I’ll have everything, a full course.” In fact, the plan had been for us to rendezvous at Chateau over at Greenbelt 5 because Xandra had been dying to try their brandy-doused steak. “I really eat, okay?” she laughs again. “Like a lot! I love food.”

Which is probably natural, coming from a family of food lovers. “Since I was little, my parents would always teach me to make sure to try everything. Even if you think you won’t like it, at least taste it, they said.” Those baby bites eventually turned in a full blown love affair, but it’s only recently that she’s really ventured into the more professional aspects of food—cooking, catering, hosting—only lately and by accident that she stumbled onto what appears to be her calling. There was a short-lived trimester pursuing a degree in Fashion Design and Merchandising at the College of Saint Benilde. “But I was just doing it so that I was doing something,” she says. “I learned it just wasn’t for me. Then a friend actually saw an ad for Enderun,” the hotel management college where Xandra is now currently enrolled in, with a pair of semesters to go, and where she also happens to be on the dean’s list, which is no surprise, coming from the way she so avidly soaks up and dispenses tidbits of culinary knowledge. (Sample of a cool thing I learned from lunch with Xandra Rocha: women are not allowed to make sushi because of their warmer body temperatures. “If we were to handle fish,” she explains, “it would spoil easier.”)

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