“My friend told me, ‘I’m going to check it out, you want to come with me?’ And I went and I said, okay, I’m going to do this because I get a bachelor’s degree. It’s not just a certificate in culinary arts. That’s how I ventured in. And you know what?” she reveals, her tone retrospective but her voice resolute. “From the beginning, I just should have gone straight for food because whatever it is I end up doing, I know it’s going to have something to do with it.”

Hence, Pinkerton Ice Cream, her baby and her brainchild, which marries her culinary skills with her entrepreneurial streak. The initial business idea was born of her desire to share her love of frozen yogurt with the Philippines, but the advent of establishments with similar offerings led her to reconsider. She explains this in the kitchen, mixing a bowl filled with a whitish, creamy mixture: her ice cream in its primal form, made from scratch, the recipe learned by reading a book and fine-tuned with experience. “I found my base,” she says, as if meaning to say that the base is the most essential thing—the base being the egg yolk and French custard foundation that endows her ice cream with its zero air pocket consistency and yields the richest, creamiest texture imaginable.

She hovers over me, present but not fussy, bustling occasionally in and out of the kitchen, then eventually plopping into a chair across me to discuss what else but food, glorious food. 

And after a late lunch of burritos and chips dipped in Xandra’s own salsa and guacamole, here it comes, Xandra herself bearing them on a tray laden with four shot glass-sized vessels. Xandra’s own philosophy is double scooped. “There’s no skimping at all. If I make a flavor, I really want it to taste pure. If I make vanilla ice cream, I use vanilla beans because I don’t want to use artificial flavoring. I want the best ingredients and quality. There’s no compromise.” The second tenet she adheres to has to do with the sourcing of these ingredients. “You don’t need to buy imported ingredients to make a quality product that’s as good as the imported ones.”

So I consider that, but I forget it all and sink into dessert oblivion after a spoonful of each of the four flavors before me. The vanilla is milkshake material, with a viscous, quicksand consistency that is paired off with a yolky sweetness. Her chocolate ice cream, meanwhile, is dark consolation, perfect for the love-stricken. And the banana. Oh, the banana. By far it is the best of the bunch, a tropical treat redolent of summer, monkeys on trees, and Caribbean coastlines. (I implore you, try it.) The coffee I taste last, and it is forceful, an edible version of a double shot espresso, the frozen equivalent of a wake up call.

All through lunch and through this tasting, she hovers over me, present but not fussy, bustling occasionally in and out of the kitchen to supervise the household help, then eventually plopping into a chair across me to discuss what else but food, glorious food. She is decked in a cobalt blue dress that cocoons her petite frame and accentuates her curves. With the energy of a little boy, she theorizes that the Chinese must have invented ice cream and that its introduction to Europe was facilitated by Marco Polo’s return to the motherland. We switch over to the freshness of her ingredients, the uniqueness of the banana, and even end up talking about common acquaintances. It almost feels like we’re old chums catching up and 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. There is an instant when Xandra’s helper comes over to refill my empty water glass. When the helper stands in between us, a pitcher-wielding arm obscuring Xandra from my view, I stop talking when suddenly I see her face reappear, just below the helper’s arm, perfectly framed—she had tilted her head sideward to ensure that the eye contact was not lost, a perfectly considerate gesture. “I love Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, Martha Stewart, and Julia Child—she started it all,” Xandra admits. “They’re the perfect hosts. Which is something like what I strive to be.”

That declaration is also in line with her ambition of not being a chef but sort of being one. “I noticed when I did an internship abroad,” she says, referring to a brief stint in Virginia working for a company that catered for private planes, “that even just after eight hours straight in the kitchen I would be so tired afterward. And I like being part of enjoying the food after. I don’t want to just be sending it out. I want to be able to socialize and entertain the guests that are enjoying the food I prepared.” Her dad echoes this sentiment. “Xandra’s very front end, but she also has knowledge of the back end,” alluding to Xandra’s emphasis on not just being stuck in the kitchen but rather being able to manage a restaurant as a profitable business and, most importantly, making sure that the experience of dining remains a communal, social affair.

Speaking of social affairs, she was in Cannes recently, but apart from food-tripping, she had jetted over to see the famed film festival (afterward, it was all over Europe—Rome, Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Split) by virtue of an all expenses paid trip she earned by winning Ms. Mouton Cadet, a beauty pageant sponsored by none other than Mouton Cadet, the official wine of the Cannes Film Festival. Literally, Xandra stood out from the pack, and a prime example is the story of the red dress. It so happened that a portion of the competition required the contestants to mingle with the crowd of guests present at the event. The judges, as of that moment unidentified, would also be part of that assembly and would evaluate the ladies’ social charms and abilities. Minutes before the contest was underway, Xandra noticed that every one of her fellow contestants, herself included, was uniformly garbed in the typical black dress. “I changed right away!” she recounts, describing the quick costume switch which saw her slip into a red dress and transform into a rose among thorns. “A lot of the girls, they were Barbie-tall, pretty, smart, and they had won previous beauty pageants,” she goes on. But screw Barbie. “There were some girls there that were like, ‘I don’t drink.’ And I was like, ‘why are you here?’ I do!”

That was a portent of things to come. As we know, when it comes to beauty pageants, legends are made (and world peace is pronounced) during the question and answer. “The 12 finalists answered the questions eloquently,” writes Maurice Arcache, “but the young, smart, gorgeous Alexandra Rocha stood out with her quick, brilliant response.” I ask Xandra to tell me about it. “I think they asked me, ‘what would you pick, beauty or intelligence?’ And then I said, beauty—of course, no, I’m kidding! I said, intelligence, because with beauty, you might look at something and you might think it’s beautiful. Just like a glass of red wine, you might look at it and think what a beautiful color. How it’s gorgeous. But it’s when you smell it,” she says, pausing briefly, her voice lowering in suspense, “it’s when you swirl it and taste all the different flavors in it that make it more complex. That really decides that it is beautiful. You find out where it’s from, the story it tells, and that’s when you decide it’s an excellent wine, a beautiful, excellent wine.”

Poetic, when you put it like that, and enough to net her the trip to Cannes, highlights of which included sightings of Quentin Tarantino and Mini-Me, a viewing of the surreal flick Visage, in which Xandra cannot forget French supermodel-turned-actress Laetitia Casta pouring tomato sauce on a man in a tub situated in the middle of a meat locker, and a 24/7 diet of foie gras, which, gentlemen, is the way to her heart.

“But it’s not my thing,” she admits, reminding me that she decided to join less than a week before the competition. “It’s more like a pageant, and I’m not the type, you know? Really not the model or pageant type because I love food so much! You can understand—they’re kind of—they don’t really go together!” she exclaims, extending both hands as far away as possible. But somehow, with her, it is easy to suspend belief in this opposition and in the opposition of the many things that she happens and wants to be—host, chef, entrepreneur, student, daughter, model. It all fits. And then she repeats, almost like a mantra, alluding to the pageant, what I’ve heard over and over, and what is only becoming clear to me now. “I said, I’ll just jump in and I’m going to go for it. And if I don’t win—whatever, I’m not going to cry.”

And if you think about it, that’s all it takes to be just like Xandra. You take a deep breath. Then you jump.

Page 2 of 2     < 1 2