A Restaurant On Every Corner

 

One sign of increasing wealth in the Philippines was the sheer number of restaurants everywhere. When I say they were everywhere, I do mean they were everywhere. Once could zoom in on a google map anywhere, including in residential districts, and find restaurants on every street and corner. I suspect licensing for restaurants in the Philippines is much less onerous than it is here in the States, which helps to explain the sheer number of them. Many look like they are just run off the porch of the home where a family lives and for the most part, I avoided those. I'm sure there are many with excellent cooking but I tend to think an actual restaurant with a name to uphold might care more about serving food that won't make me sick. 

So one afternoon while out driving about, we went to eat at a newer restaurant which was making a name for itself on social media. From what I gathered, the cook of that particular restaurant had made his name on some cooking television show for cooking/smoking meats in the Igorot traditions. Indeed on a patio out back overlooking Baguio, there were several large metal vats that had been converted into smokers at some point.

Above is our family style meal that we ordered which was some smoked meats and vegetables served in a bowl of broth along with red rice and accompaniments. The red rice was something new to me as well. In all my prior trips to the Philippines, meals were always white rice. However, most of the rice grown in the Philippines is red with some of it even being black. In the years since my last trip, there has been a national push to eat more of their home grown rice and import less of the white rice mainly grown elsewhere. With the exception of a few higher end restaurants we ate at during our time in the Philippines, we mostly ate red rice. 

Mostly the photo above is just a gratuitous photo of a bulletin board on a wall of the restaurant. In America, you might see business cards tacked up but here, it apparently was customary to pin up a picture of yourself. I didn't have a picture of myself handy so declined.

After lunch we stopped at a bakery for a bit of sweets. Unfortunately, having become completely lactose intolerant, I am not able to eat a lot of things like those above these days. Many of the pastries in the Philippines had unknown cheeses in them or were glazed in substances that may or may not have contained milk. If I were back home and had my bottle of lactaid pills with me, I might have tried them anyway because the consequences of accidentally ingesting some lactose are relatively benign. But in the Philippines where even the best bathrooms are somewhere like a heavily trafficked gas station bathroom without toilet paper, and with all the traveling we were doing, I felt it wiser just to pay for the treats and watch the others enjoy them. This trip I mostly stuck to eating plain pandesal which is a somewhat sweet bread roll found nearly everywhere you go.