Description
Depending on when you come, you'll encounter some familiar classics, including ox tail simmered in peanut butter for kare kare, a string bean-loaded sauté of veggies called pinakbet, and an adobo that has slow-cooked, fat-rimmed chunks of pork belly embellished with fried potatoes. Next to the chafing trays, a selection of fried items warm under heat lamps. Caveman-sized hunks of deep-fried, bone-in pork legs called crispy pata dwarf the daintier cubes of fried pork belly known as lechon kawale. Usually, three options of fried fish are present to balance out the fried-pork offerings. If it's available, always take the daing na bangus―marinated, boneless filets of deep-fried milkfish blessed with an immutable tang―over the comparably boring choices of salmon, tilapia or pomfret. Shun even that if jeprox is on the table. These golden, paper-thin swoops of salted, crisply fried, dried sole resemble petrified fossils and are usually packaged in clear to-go containers, ready to be eaten whole, bones and all.
