Actually, when you’re in Baguio, make sure that you eat a Caesar Salad, heck, any salad while you’re there. The crisp air keeps the vegetables fresh and even a simple tossed green salad will be the most delicious tossed green salad you’ve ever eaten.

I’m partial to Caesar Salad when I’m up in Baguio. It’s garlicky and piquant enough at the BCC to make me close one eye in sour anticipation. I like plenty of anchovies in my Caesar Salad dressing, although I’ve read that Caesar Cardini, the inventor of the said salad, did not approve of adding anchovy to his original list of six ingredients: romaine lettuce, garlic, olive oil, croutons, Parmesan cheese, and Worcestershire sauce.

Plenty of aficionados prefer to use a large wooden bowl when making Caesar Salad so that the ingredients are able to adhere to the sides. At the BCC, they do use a wooden bowl and as you can see from the photo, they have a trolley with the ingredients for the salad. I just don’t know why they make the salad in a corner in full view of the diners, instead of at tableside.

Calamansi Pie

Pronounced (ca-la-man-SI), this is a small citrus fruit native to the Philippines. About as large as a red cherry, the calamansi is pure acid and is indispensable to Filipino cookery – in marinades, sauces, drinks, etc. Now it’s been made into a pie, although I think this is a relatively new invention.

Because the calamansi is so small, I can’t even begin to estimate how many of the small fruit would have to be squeezed to make one pie. The juice is very tart and there are plenty of seeds, so making a pie like this would be quite laborious, I presume.

Still, this calamansi pie was quite a revelation. Soft and mousse-like with a gentle tang, it sits unassumingly on a simple graham cracker crust. The pie is tinted a light green with food coloring, similar to what some bakers would do for a lime pie.

This pie is made in Baguio. I can’t tell you where it comes from because I myself don’t know. All I know is that it was given to my mom and I had to split the last pie with her because she liked it as much as I did.

Hot Chocolate

I prefer hot chocolate to coffee, and native hot chocolate (tsokolate) is tops. Pronounced (CHO-ko-la-teh), the drink is made from native cocoa tablets that have some ground peanut in them.

It’s actually very easy to mess up a cup of hot chocolate. I find most versions of tsokolate to be very watered down – it’s almost like drinking brown water. Ugh. Others taste like cheap versions of the pre-made mixes.

The tsokolate that they serve at the Baguio Country Club pleases me on all counts. It’s thick and sweet, dark as night and served piping hot from a silver pot, which unfortunately, they don’t leave at your table.