Country and city in one setting

Our last meal at Nuvali, before we set out to do battle on the way home, was lunch at M Grill and Banh Café in Solenad 3. Still true to the weekend theme of “healthy living,” the food at M Grill is predominantly vegetarian although there are meat and seafood choices as well.

My “go to” choices were the Mongolian bowls since I hadn’t tried these for some time, ever since the once-faddish foodie trend faded in the 2000s. The buffet at M Grill was pretty standard, but what made it stand out for me was the wide variety of sauces and ingredients with instructions on how to mix a “regular” sauce, a “sweet” one, a “sweet and spicy” one, and a “super hot” concoction. Coward that I am, I chose the “regular” blend although on hindsight I should have chosen to spice things up even if only for a little zing.

According to the owner, the most popular items on the menu are the Vietnamese pho or noodle soup variations as well as the banh mi or Vietnamese sandwiches, which my daughter-in-law declared were far superior to those found in the city. There was even dessert: fried bananas drizzled with chocolate, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in the center.

We certainly needed to be fortified given the saga of our trip back. Leaving our home in Antipolo on Sunday morning, we reached Nuvali in just over an hour. It was a vastly different story on Monday afternoon, when, following the “helpful” Waze guide on my son’s phone, we trekked through the narrow, congested streets of Taguig and Pasig before another hourlong crawl along Marcos Highway, three hours after we set off.

John Estacio, Nuvali general manager, says traffic is the reason Ayala Land first set off developing the 2,290-hectare mixed-use property. The plan was to enable buyers or locators to build their homes on any of the 23 housing developments, work in the different business sites including BPO offices, send their children to schools nearby, and shop and play in the Solenad mall and sites like N Camp adventure playground.

But even as they strive to upgrade the facilities to fully enable “mixed-use” living, they are also exploring ways to make commuting between Nuvali and Makati, including BGC, feasible and convenient, Estacio says.

There is a point-to-point or P2P service from Santa Rosa to Makati and BGC, while the CalEx, or Cavite-Laguna Expressway, once completed, should make driving through the Southern Tagalog corridor a breeze, or breezier than it currently is. “Our goal now is to attract more corporations and their employees,” says Estacio, “which should serve as the ‘glue’ to get people here and stay here.”

A linchpin in the plan to develop Nuvali as a “second city” in the south of Manila was to “learn from the lessons of our previous developments,” says Estacio.

With the luxury of hindsight and foresight, Ayala Land, says Estacio, decided to plan and prepare the site for future developments, including a potential growth in population, with both residents and workers, and the concomitant growth in demands on vehicular traffic, on space and on density.

This early, points out Estacio, they have constructed extra wide roads with generous swathes of unused land in the center, envisioned as sites for the planned “rail-bus” system to ferry commuters to and from the Makati business center.

“We were also very conscious about preserving and protecting the environment,” notes Estacio, pointing out projects like a bird sanctuary, and creeks and ponds in their raw untouched forms, making sure water runoff is given a lot of room to be absorbed back by the soil.

The goal, says Estacio, is to make for a good mix of country and city living for Nuvali residents and workers, with provincial quiet and calm, within a more suburban setting complete with all the conveniences that urbanites have gotten used to.

“Our people have raised their standards,” says Estacio of Nuvali’s particular appeal to OFWs and their families. Their exposure to more updated features have led them to expect higher standards of living, he says, and that their wish is to meet these heightened expectations in Nuvali.