Lechon Stories

It was in Sagay, a small coastal town on the northern tip of the island of Negros Occidental in the Visayas, in 1999, where I would say without any qualification that I had the best lechon I had ever tasted. Hosted by the Maranon family (the mayor of Sagay and the Governor of Negros were both Maranons then) and my cousin Lyn Besa-Gamboa, we boarded a pumpboat to taste a lechon by “Enting Lobaton,” the Master Lechonero of Bacolod and Silay.

We broke out with wild cheers as we approached the waving advance team sent by Enting to transform an empty sandbar into a full-blown picnic area. When we arrived, people crowded around the lechon scene—a steel drum cut lengthwise packed with carefully placed coal embers and a five-month-old native pig about forty pounds on a long, slender bamboo spit rotating on metal stands.