You must know that when it comes to Manila, I’m hardly ever there. Reason is: I don’t know my way enough around that city to save my life. Hence, I’m hardly ever at Mall of Asia, Roxas Blvd., or even Malate or Robinson’s Place. Manila denizens who read this are most likely shaking their head and clucking their tongues, “Poor thing.” Yes, indeed. So on the rare occasion my Bin and Boo are in Manila, we’re here cruising around the gargantuan Mall of Asia complex. The first thing my Bin says upon seeing the “San Miguel By The Bay” sign is, “Wow, branding!” He would know -- it’s a statement that echoes his marketing and sales background. I almost expect a San Miguel Beer “blimp” to be looming down on us somewhere. As we drive down the road, restaurants – familiar and not so familiar – attract us, their bright lights melding into one another like in a ...

What is extreme? Extreme is eating 12 scoops of ice cream in one sitting. Extreme is eating four cupcakes for breakfast. Extreme is falling so hard in love with a coffee shop that I eat there twice in seven hours. I’m guilty of all of the above, and so extreme is my latest sin of excess that it should be called “xtreme.” Note: For the remainder of this post, “extreme” is spelled xtreme. Xtremely Xpresso Café is a tremendously popular coffee shop in Subic. Calling it a coffee shop however, grossly undermines its totality. It’s so much more than that – it’s a coffee place, a café, a pizza parlor, a pastry shop, and a deli. Now that’s xtreme. The café opened in 2003 serving primarily espresso-based beverages and accompanying sweets. The moniker, Xtremely Xpresso, connotes the “extremes” the owners will go to give the best to their patrons. Apparently, so xtremely good were their efforts that the management soon expanded their offerings to include a full-service menu from breakfast to soups to salads to pasta to main courses and pizzas. The café-now-restaurant’s xtreme claims to fame are their pizzas. The oversized rounds are edibles encapsulating xtreme-ness: size. At ...

When it comes to a businesswoman’s/businessman’s lunch, pace (it’s got to be snappy) and space (ambiance conducive to conversation) are ideal. Value is, inherently, the bottom line. The Peninsula Manila’s Old Manila has launched a Rib-Eye Lunch Buffet – four words that induce gasps and glassy-eyed visions of slabs of meat with fat that shimmers like Queen Nefertiti’s crown. I’m tantalized with a carnivorous greed that borders on the pornographic. Because it’s billed as a Businessman’s Lunch, the buffet is lean, a stark contrast to its counterparts that are paeans to excess. An adequate amount of appetizers and starches are supporting players to the star that is the beef. I consider a starter plate of smoked salmon spiked with spicy mustard and caper berries; a salad of mesclun and bitter arugula; two types of cold salads – potato and pasta, the latter boasts large chunks of the tuber. Generous lashings of freshly cracked black pepper, salt, and some cream of white asparagus soup. The soup is a bit salty today but I taste the fineness of the white vegetable and cream. Ah! My stomach is now properly primed and lined....

I think the way a person eats Oreos is programmed at birth. And it has nothing to do with genetics, I tell you. I have no patience for twisting-licking-dunking – I eat the cookies as is. My little girl Boo, however, has a very organized way of eating these chocolate sandwich cookies. Armed with a glass of milk, she lines the cookies up in a row (they usually come three to a wrapper), and with a deliberateness highly uncommon in a 5 year old, she’ll gently pry the two cookies apart, lick the white filling off of each cookie, and then eat each cookie after it’s been anointed in her glass of milk. I’m not in the habit of cloning convenience treats but an excess of Dutch cocoa convinces me to try my hand at making homemade Oreos. This type of cookie is far from the drop cookies that I usually make -- chocolate chip cookies and their ilk that are scooped up and then dropped onto a baking sheet. Oreos (at least the homemade version) are a type of rolled cookie where the dough is mixed, chilled, rolled out, shaped into circles with ...

Eating out is like trying my luck at the lotto, give or take some factors. Lately, I’ve been on a “losing streak,” where every restaurant I’ve been to has me feeling a hunger in my stomach and soul. It’s terribly disconcerting. Unless my meal was especially horrid, I almost always go back to a restaurant a second, even third time just to see if the first time around was a fluke. Here then, are some of my hits and misses in three separate posts all to be posted in one day. In this series: Cocorama, C2 Classic Cuisine, and Paul Calvin’s Deli. Paul Calvin’s Deli The instructions are: ”It’s at the Fort … somewhere on the road between McDonald's and Market Market.” I agree, not too helpful yes, and in my search to find Paul Calvin’s Deli, I end up taking a tour of the entire Fort; that is, until a security guard who’s heard of the place, points me in the right direction. There’s not much to dislike about the place, in fact, I fall in love with it at first sight. Hues of orange and butter yellow glide into one another effortlessly accented by touches of country ...

Eating out is like trying my luck at the lotto, give or take some factors. Lately, I’ve been on a “losing streak,” where every restaurant I’ve been to has me feeling a hunger in my stomach and soul. It’s terribly disconcerting. Unless my meal was especially horrid, I almost always go back to a restaurant a second, even third time just to see if the first time around was a fluke. Here then, are some of my hits and misses in three separate posts all to be posted in one day. In this series: Cocorama, C2 Classic Cuisine, and Paul Calvin’s Deli. C2 Classic Cuisine While Manila has become a global playground for our palates, I’ll never lose my love for Filipino food. While the classics reign supreme, there are times when I’m in the mood to be entertained by whimsical twists and tweaks on tradition. One such place that does this well is C2 Classic Cuisine, a restaurant of the Cravings Group. Considering that the restaurant is a training ground for students of the Center for Culinary Arts (CCA), I’m surprised by how seamlessly the ...

Eating out is like trying my luck at the lotto, give or take some factors. Lately, I’ve been on a “losing streak,” where every restaurant I’ve been to has me feeling a hunger in my stomach and soul. It’s terribly disconcerting. Unless my meal was especially horrid, I almost always go back to a restaurant a second, even third time just to see if the first time around was a fluke. Here then, are some of my hits and misses in three separate posts all to be posted in one day. In this series: Cocorama, C2 Classic Cuisine, and Paul Calvin’s Deli. Cocorama This place has got verve. A Beach-Boys-meets-Studio-54 vibe that jives in a groovy kind of way with the glitzy disco ball and the red and white VW Combi that serves as their kitchen (don’t ask me how they did it). A hanging blackboard at the back has an enigmatic message (that changes everyday) scrawled on it. Today it’s, “A nuclear war can really ruin your day.” (???) Cocorama’s tongue-in-cheek sense of humor is most pronounced in their Jackson Five Pancake Stack (P135; see ...

Admittedly, the restaurant’s name, Purple Feet, gives me pause, but once I’m made to see that the restaurant is an extension of the wine store, it all starts to make sense. The wine making process of old included the time-honored tradition of stomping the grapes into what is commonly referred to as “must”, the freshly-pressed juice of grapes. Today, mechanical crushers have replaced the “purple feet,” thus “stomping out,” (some say) the romance and ritual of wine making, but one cannot argue the tremendous sanitary gain that the mechanical presses bring. Purple Feet is decidedly unfussy in its ambiance, almost utilitarian in its décor. Guests are surrounded by crates of wine and sit on wooden tables and chairs. Wine choices are listed on pillars, and as I can expect from a restaurant that claims its “wine list is our wine shop,” wine is a huge aspect of the dishes served here. This restaurant is what I imagine a wine lover’s paradise looks like. The chef, Marco Legasto, invites diners to let their culinary imaginations fly. The menu is written out on a big blackboard for all to see, raw materials that the chefs can work wonders on: ...