Restaurants in the Philippines die: either they grow old and tired, or they fail to push food culture forward, or some of the worst even franchise. Zong is doing all three.

The food is still good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just a fraction of what it used to be. Zong used to be great, now it’s just good and it’s hard not to notice how that once excellent Cantonese fare that I had a few years ago has turned ordinary. The concepts for the food remain ambitious and forward-looking but somehow, the execution of the food we ate in its Trinoma branch lacks finesse.


Take the Fried Prawn and Peach Rolls. I remember eating dumplings in Beijing that utilized peaches and it used fresh ones that were flavored with a lot of things and it excited my palate. This one made use of canned peaches that was simply too sweet and syrupy and didn’t mesh well with the prawn filling. With the dipping sauce that accompanied this dumpling, I thought I was eating prawn salad. Granted fresh peaches are hard to find here, one can always substitute other fruits for it: pears, apples, maybe even jicama or coconut. Sweetened canned ones just made the dish taste like a confused dessert.


Some dishes are safe. Their Braised Vegetable with Mushroom and Scallops sounded good but it is stir fry that you can find anywhere. And like most restaurants that cheat on ingredients, there was too much shiitake mushrooms on this one and not a lot scallops. It’s fairly simple to prepare and they executed it properly.


Another thing that was just okay was their Chef Seafood Fried Rice.


Thankfully, the Pan Fried Chicken with Salted Egg Crust was still good. Zong has made a reputation out of this dish. It’s your basic fried chicken only the batter covering it makes use of salted eggs.

What I did find sad is the lack of thought put into the other aspects of the eating experience. Zong used to be polished before and the service reliable. This time, it’s beginning to waver. The black plates are pretty to look at with a deconstructed yin-yang symbol embedded on the surface but they left this tingly sensation each time the tip of my spoon or fork touched it. Maybe it works well with wooden chopsticks, but definitely not silverware. We came there on a Sunday for lunch, and they had their music switched on to one of those radio stations playing sad music from the 70s and 80s that somewhat disrupted the dining experience. Other patrons were laughing at the songs, and while the songs did evoke a reaction, it wasn’t pleasant. While I am not looking for authentic Chinese music, maybe a-half-dozen CDs with pre-screened songs can be played instead of taking chances with titles like “Tainted Love” or “Solitaire”. That or keep the volume down. There’s also that poorly-finished interior that was still decorated with Christmas ornaments towards the end of January. We sat at a corner table and you could see the hurried paint job on the walls were the banquette chairs rested and some cobwebs. While all of these things have nothing to do with the food, you can’t help but think that the once meticulous details that lent a calming mood and a coherent taste to Zong are being neglected.

Zong Restaurant has branches in Trinoma, The Fort, Westgate in Alabang.

I was always intimidated by making cheesecake. I sat down one day to eat a not-so great cheesecake in a popular coffee shop as I waited for a scheduled meeting to commence and I figured that cheesecake is as simple as pie--or in this case, cake. I tried this recipe from Moms Who Think, and after some modification came up with this:

For the crust:
15 pcs. Graham crackers, crushed
1/4 cup of melted butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp. salt

Pre-heat oven to 175 degrees Celsius or 350 degrees Fahrenheit. In a food processor or blender, combine Grahams, butter, sugar and salt. Press mixture onto a 9-inch round pan. Bake for 8-10 minutes.

For the filling:
2 packs of 8 oz. cream cheese
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
3 eggs
2 tbsp. lemon juice

Beat cream cheese in a bowl until fluffy. Add milk and sugar gradually, and then the eggs and lemon juice.

Take out the crust and place the filling in. Bake for about 30 to 45 minutes or until set. Let it cool and refrigerate before serving.


If you're not using a convection oven, don't forget to turn the pan around 20 to 25 minutes through so as not to burn one side like what happened to mine. Top it with your favorite fruit compote, sour cream mixed with sugar and vanilla, jelly preserves, or even chocolate. As for me, this is just fine.

Food coming from the lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea is among the best in the world and one of my favorites. While the term “Mediterranean” carries with it disputable representations of the numerous cultures in that very region, and the term “Mediterranean cuisine” is a product of American simplification to turn food practices in the region into yet another commodity (i.e. the Mediterranean diet, with that infamous pyramid nutrition chart), Mediterranean food can be characterized primarily by a shared practice for olive oil, garlic, the domestication of goats and sheep, and the emphasis of seafoods in the diet compared to other sources of animal protein.

Imagine kalamata olives, feta cheese, hummus, pita bread, falafel and couscous. Or better yet: imagine Greek, Turkish, Italian, Croatian, Spanish and Portuguese cuisine fused together.

I get my Mediterranean fix from Café Mediterranean. Their centerpiece are their grilled kebabs—pork, beef, chicken, fish—that are used to fill their gyros, toppings on their pizzas and pairings for their rice and couscous meals. These freshly grilled proteins form the base for many of their dishes and they are good. My favorite is this Chicken Kebab Pizza:


Tomato sauce, mozzarella, olive oil, chunks of grilled chicken kebabs, a heavy dose of sour cream, and green chili. If you can tolerate the heat, try crushing the chili to spread all over the pizza.

Other things to try:

Greek salad.

Grilled Tuna Gyro.

White Pizza. The good thing about this pizza is that it’s really good when it’s cooked well. It was dry on this visit.

Panna Cotta. The panna cotta base is good, the topping tasted like preservative-laden marmalade. I wish they could do something about it.

Tartufo al Cioccolato. Heavenly chocolate truffle ice cream.

Other things I keep coming back for: Sicilian Tuna Steak, Black Olive Tapenade on Pita Bread and Mediterranean Chicken.

Another nice thing about Café Mediterranean is the casual atmosphere created by the restaurant’s interior. You get beefy wooden tables with an inlay of faux Iznik tiles. Around it are white stucco-like walls, an array of colored floor tiles, Moroccan lamps and more wooden accents and décor that hark back to the different cultures in the region. It’s a relaxing reprieve from the stiffness of most streamlined restaurant interiors, without necessarily being too shabby.

Cafe Mediterranean has branches in Robinson's Galleria, Greenbelt, Mall of Asia, Alabang Town Center, The Podium, Power Plant Mall and Gov. Sales St. Visit their website here.

I went to Korea Garden in Jupiter Street in Makati for a birthday, and got a semblance the depth I expect of Korean food. It’s not as good as I expect it to be considering much of Korean food is always associated by the things I have read with words such as the lunar year, ritual, celebration and myth. I keep looking for that whenever I eat Korean. I explored the possibilities of finding Korea in the Korean food in foodcourts a few months ago by comparing Kimchi and Honey’s Kimchi. Both were disappointing since neither tasted realistically Korean, and both may have just been using the adjective ‘Korean’ as a means to market and make itself stand out in a deluge of forgettable products. I feel deprived of subtlety, delicateness and freshness, characteristics often expected from Korean food. The interplay of colors borrowed from different seasons subdued by the pale and opaque rice boxed in crisp looking containers, reminding me of clean transitions. There are no transitions in the things we find in the foodcourt, and definitely no subtlety and no finesse. With the Korean from the foodcourt is a bombardment of flavors: sweet and salty mostly and a little bit of spicy, with hardly any depth and texture.

Korea Garden is just ok. The subtlety is there although a lot more can be made of it if the ingredients are fresh, and the presentation a little more organic. I am not sure what can be done with the ingredient’s freshness since everything seems to be derived from canned and preserved Korean goods bought from the grocery. There has been an influx of Korean nationals in Manila in recent years and with it an assortment of delis and groceries that import everything from Kimchi to dashida--Korean soup stock. Whether it is too much to ask for fresher alternatives considering the intricacy of making such preparations that may not be readily accessible here, I don’t know. But there is a world of possibility in grocery food that can be maximized, and the direction should not necessarily be as traditional as Korea Garden would like to take it since theirs is a rather humbling alternative to the glory of traditional Korean food that emphasizes freshness.

As for the presentation, a lot can be rectified still. I demand so much on the presentation because I was promised traditional. Hence, I expect an orderly display of ramequins: clean lines on the table, or ingredients that are arranged inside a bowl or serving dish, of things presented on the plate and on the table that will pulse in the eye, move, exude rhythm, dance, and speak of transitions just like this photo of different banchan (side dishes) from Wikipedia:


Instead, everything is so haphazardly prepared and presented. And the magic and wonder of Korean etiquette and cultural practice is shoved under familiar plating that is neither Filipino nor Korean, and looks pretty much Cantonese. I am demanding a lot from appearances because I am missing the transitions in flavor that put the Korean in Korean food.


The arrangement of elements on the plate and on the table will dictate what you eat and how you eat them. The banchan pictured above is a confusing amalgam of flavors. On their own, they’re ok. But together, they’re a mess, and my tongue seems to move from salty to sour to spicy to sweet to starchy with hardly any finesse. These side dishes are supposed to be found at the center of the table, meant to be shared and refilled as needed, and to compliment the main dishes. Instead, they were served as appetizers.


The stand-out was the Tak Kui, grilled chicken. Underneath all the charred flavors of the barbecue sauce, it was well seasoned and cooked.


Another great thing was the Kimchi Fried Rice. It was a meal on its own, and didn’t really go well with the Tak Kui, or any other dish for that matter since the kimchi overpowered everything.


The Bogumbop fried rice fared much better in fusing itself with the rest of the meal.


This squid dish (I’m not sure of the name), wasn’t so good. It was oily and plain.


And this Mushroom Bogum (again, not sure of the name) is basically stir-fry that became a little too excited with the spices.

Korea Garden is located at 128 Jupiter St., Bel-Air 2, Makati. Phone Numbers are (02) 895-5443 and (02) 896-4361.

We went for a quick trip to the College of Music for some good old reliable fishballs, those yummy concoctions made from a bunch of fish scraps that are doused with flour, formed into balls, deep fried until golden brown, skewered on a wooden stick, and dipped in sweet-sour (and sometimes spicy) gravy made of the vendor’s best-kept secrets and thickened with--again--flour. For the uninitiated, the concept is outright yucky and crass, but the fishballs are, for me, the crown jewels of Filipino street food. There are squid balls and chicken balls and tuknene and kikiam and a whole lot of other skewered treats on a fishball cart alone. It’s the simplest to prepare and the trickiest. The simplest because all fishballs taste the same—it used to be bought in bulk in Binondo and Quiapo, now the practice has spread to places like Navotas, Malabon and Bulacan with hardly any innovation. Despite the simplicity, it is difficult to produce really great fishballs that people will want to crave for. The real challenge lies in preparing the dipping sauce. It’s either you have it or you don’t. And in a land teeming with seasoned fishball eaters, it is hard to perfect the sauce for fishballs.


There is also an economic and class-conscious stigma associated with fishballs and any other street food. Such practices have saved many Filipinos from the expense of having to sit in more expensive restaurants when there is not just food available at home or in transit from work to home and vice versa, but also when there isn’t any time or energy to prepare a meal.

Studying in UP for my graduate degrees often meant eating fishballs before and after those three-hour night classes, and somehow I looked forward to it more than the classes themselves. The company was great, and the decadence of the ambience was just bliss for me. I often ate outside the College of Music. And while it is hard to imagine any form of ambience with something as pedestrian as fishballs, the College of Music transported the pedestrian fare into something special. Back then the fishball stand was right in front of the main entrance of the building and that translated to a large spawn of thick grass and a row of trees that separated the kiosk from the main road where the jeeps and cars passed. It’s the congestion one expects of fishball: faint grunts of gasoline blowing against mufflers in the background. But the music school also provided a reprieve to everything we despise about the city: the delicate and almost breath-like sound of pianos and violins from the building. That ambience, the good company I am so fortunate to have had and the fact that the fishball sauce was really really good made the fishball eating sprees in UP a real treat.


Unfortunately, new regulations have forced the old fishball stand from the College of Music to move to the side of the building facing Plaridel Hall (housing the College of Mass Communications). It’s beside the road and a little more grittier than usual, there’s no music to be heard, and worse, the old reliable manong who made really good fishball sauce is gone. The fishball is just ok now and is served in these more sanitary paper plates to minimize contamination in the sauce bottles, which lessens the, uhm, communal experience. Considering I haven’t eaten fishballs in months—maybe years even—this was good enough to induce the nostalgia.

Café Bola, Margarita Fores’s most affordable restaurant, serves the best Italian-Filipino fusion food. The multi-franchised Cibo offers clean and modern renditions of Italian food for about twice to quadruple the price of Café Bola, while Pepato in Greenbelt is a high-end restaurant that remains to be a rare indulgence for someone with wages like mine. The formula for keeping Café Bola’s prices down is quite simple and, for me, rather brilliant—considering it is more ecologically sustainable as opposed to other restaurant practices. Margarita Fores is able to combine the best of both worlds: the processes of Italian cooking that has given it worldwide renown, and local ingredients and flavors that offer a world of possibility in pushing a rather traditional cuisine (whose best is often hidden in family recipes passed on from generation to generation) forward. The result is an innovative menu that includes:

Toasted Pandesal Rounds with Banana Heart and Keso De Bola Dip. This appetizer was our favorite. (I have a recipe here.)

Spicy Tuyo Fillet on Egg and Rice.

Adobo Flakes and Kesong Puti on Rice.



Parma-Ham Scented Monggo with Crispy Dilis on Rice.

Seafood Bolas on Pasta with Sour Cream and Paprika Sauce.

Spaghetti with Tomatoes, Basil and White Cheese.

Bola Flan.

Classic Tiramisu. When you get it good, it’s good. The quality can be a little inconsistent, though. There are days when this tiramisu is dry as not enough espresso has seeped through the lady fingers.

Kesong Puti Cheesecake. My favorite. It’s a little tangier than the regular cheesecake so there’s something that soothes the palate from the typical deluge of cream cheese.

(Mind you, I didn’t eat all of this. I ate with my friends from work.)

While Café Bola’s food is generally good, there are some annoying quirks to the restaurant. First are the small serving portions especially for their main dishes. I wouldn’t mind paying 50% more if they’d just increase their serving portions by a quarter of what they normally serve.

There’s also the annoying motif of the bola (literally, balls) that peppers the place. It’s in the food, it’s in the décor, it’s the shape of the table, it’s the graphic on the walls, it is the shape of the sugar dispenser, the ball is everywhere. I don’t know the thematic significance of having to obsess over so many balls, but it can grate on your head when you eat. Then again, I obsess over small details but must Margarita Fores go overboard about being literal about—of all things—balls?

Bola in Filipino can also connote to fool someone through flattery or smooth talk. And I wonder if this restaurant’s particular concept is a not-so witty take on trying to nip the pretenses off Italian food hounding a city teeming with restaurants charging an arm and a leg for not-so-good from canned and preserved ingredients, a practice which isn’t really Italian. Others argue it’s the way we have appropriated Italian. I don’t think so. I always think of Café Bola’s clean crisp fresh flavors as the benchmark for successfully appropriating Italian in these third world shores.

We tried the Italian restaurant Abbondanza in Pearl Drive, Ortigas a few months ago after hearing news that the joint pirated the chef of Amici, the Don Bosco-based Italian cafeteria-style restaurant whose food has gone from good to inconsistent after selling its soul to the franchising devil. We thought that probably the chef at Amici would carry the charm and restore good food in this part of the universe by jumping ship at Abbondanza. Sadly, that’s not the case. I have eaten at Abbondanza thrice for meetings in the Ortigas area, and I have yet to be served something decent.

I found myself again in Abbondanza recently to celebrate a friend’s birthday. We made plans to eat at Stir Fry (name uncertain) in the same street only to find it closed on weekends. Hungry and afraid of the traffic Ortigas attracts on weekends, we ended up in Abbondanza, and lo and behold, it has gotten even worse.

Thankfully, my other friends weren’t particularly impressed with Abbondanza and we ended up ordering two things (tactfully trying to avoid their server’s suggestions to try their pasta): their Pollo Arrosto (Roasted Chicken) and their Pizza Napoli.


Both sucked. The Pollo Arrosto was drenched in tomato sauce and there was not one hint of flavor that married the tomato sauce’s sweet-sour quality with the homey flavors that are intrinsic to chicken. We were looking for rosemary and thyme, classic flavors that complement chicken well. There weren’t any. We got parsely, mostly used as garnish to contrast with the over-zealous redness of the tomato sauce. And we also got a liberal sprinkling of salt which just highlighted the fact that this dish wasn’t seasoned well. More salt can be found on the vegetable sidings, as can be seen in the photo.


The Pizza Napoli sucked even more. Even if the menu promised anchovies, no anchovies can be found on our pizza, and the salty quality of the Napoli was supplied by briny capers. The pizza was also dry and we had to sprinkle a lot of chili flakes and drizzle oil on it just to give it some depth. To no avail.

If it's any indication, patronage should be a concern. Abbondanza should take a clue from the lack of patrons in the neighborhoods and residential buildings beside them. Amici was supported by its neighbors in Makati, Aveneto was first embraced by residents surrounding its first branch in Visayas Avenue. Except for one table, Abbondanza was almost empty when we got there at around 7:30 pm.


No dads in shorts carrying babies, no mothers making weird requests to waiters to remove certain ingredients their kids would probably not eat, no families and extended families that you see patronizing those two other Italian wannabes mentioned above, and definitely no excitement generated from the few patrons who were there. Unless Abbondanza picks up on their quality, they don’t deserve to charge 300 bucks for their pizza.

I first tasted Chicken Binakol as a kid when I stayed at Mama Angie’s house in Iloilo. I see it as the Ilonggo’s version of the more popular Chicken Tinola, traditional chicken soup that’s laced with the zesty ginger, great on rainy days and as a remedy for the flu. The Binakol works with the same premise as Tinola, relying heavily on ginger to give it a zing. The only difference is, Chicken Binakol is stewed in coconut water and is given an extra kick by tanglad or lemon grass. I was supposed to make Tinola but decided the last minute to switch it to Chicken Binakol when I discovered we were out of sayote (chayotes) or green papayas and after unearthing a few stalks of leftover lemon grass. I didn’t have a fresh coconut or coconut water but I did have some hard coconut to extract coconut cream from and I figured why not.

In a hot pot, saute garlic, onions and ginger in oil. When the onions become translucent, stir in the lemon grass. Add the chicken pieces, season with salt and pepper and stir until skin turns white.

Add the water, and reduce the heat when it starts to boil. When the chicken is cooked add the fish sauce and season with salt and pepper to taste.

By this time, the water has reduced significantly. Add the coconut cream, let it boil and then allow to simmer for 10-15 minutes.

Turn the heat off and stir in the chili leaves. Serve hot.


On hindsight, this would have been better with green papayas or sayote. Try adding some vegetables when you try making yours.

It’s strange how I am craving for Halo-Halo considering it’s January and it’s cold in the tropics. It’s the coldest part of the year and I am loving it. I would like to dwell on the coldness even more and give myself some halo-halo loving: that dessert and meryenda from our childhood that chilled the throat, and wheted the taste buds with layers and layers of sweetness coming from an assortment of halo-halong beans and fruits topped with ice and milk. Everything is mixed together (halo-halo is a noun derived from an adjective that literally means mixed together) and the fun comes in scooping out the different ingredients swimming in creamy and (sometimes decadent) milk, and chunks of shaved ice.

The traditional Filipino halo-halo seems simple but it does entail a lot of preparation. I am fortunate to have been born at a time early enough to see aunts sweetening bananas, jackfruits, sweet potatoes, and an assortment of beans, whipping up delicions leche flan using carabao’s milk, turning purple yams into ubeng halaya, and pounding young gluitnous rice to turn it into pinipig. I am also fortunate to have been born this late to be able to enjoy the comforts of halo-halo at a whim as you can pay other folks to prepare for you or make it myself using preserved ingredients that can be bought in a bottle or a can in any grocery.

I would still love making the traditional halo-halo BUT it is tedious. That and all the sugar is scary. It is worth it if you have fresh ingredients and if you have half a day or more to do everything. You can shorten the process considerably if you have more than one pot and burner. The difficulty comes in having to boil each ingredient individually in a pot of water and sugar. The proportions and cooking time for each is as follows:

Ingredient	Water	Sugar	Boiling time
Minatamis na kamote (sweetened sweet potato), 1 kilo (5 medium-sized) peeled and cut into ½ inch cubes	10 cups	2 cups	20-30 minutes or until potatoes are soft and cooked
Sago or tapioca pearls, 1 cup soaked overnight	6 cups	½ cup	30 minutes or until tapioca is tender and translucent
White beans, 1 cup	6 cups	1 cup	45 minutes or until beans are cooked, drain liquid after
1 cup red Monggo or Mung beans soaked overnight	8 cups	1 cup	45 minutes or until beans are cooked, drain liquid after
1 cup peeled Saba or plantains cut into ½ inch cubes	1 cup	1cup	15 minutes
1 cup kaong or sugar palm	1 cup	1 cup	15 minutes
1 cup coconut strips for macapuno	1 cup	½ cup	25 minutes
1 cup langka or jackfruit cut into strips	1 cup	½ cup	20 minutes

Then there’s the business of the halayang ube or purple yam jam. For every kilo of purple yam, use about a cup of sugar, 2 cups of coconut milk, 1 cup of coconut cream, 200 ml condensed milk and ½ cup of butter. Boil the yams until they’re tender. Peel and cut it into ½ inch cubes, and mash it in a bowl along with the sugar and coconut milk. Transfer the mixture in a large pan and stir it continuously adding the butter, coconut cream and condensed milk gradually. Once the mixture no longer sticks to the pan, turn off the heat and transfer it to a shallow pan.

Of course you don’t have to do everything yourself and get everything in bottled jars in the grocery.

Other things you can mix in your halo-halo: garbanzos, kondol (wintermelon), pinipig (rice crispies), gulaman (red agar-agar), mais (corn kernels), leche flan (custard) and mangoes. Other not-so common things you may want to try on your halo-halo: candied pineapples, durian, and even papaya. When everything’s prepared, you have to set them aside first and allow to cool though I have tasted some fantastic halo-halo before that used hot and freshly cooked ingredients that contrasted with the cold ice.


Using a large bowl or a tall glass, add about a tablespoon of each ingredient or until the glass or bowl is half-full. Seasoned halo-halo makers have developed their own artistry in layering not just the colors of the ingredients (yellow, black, red green) but also their textures (hard ones in the bottom, soft on top) and weight (the ones that float easily are left in the bottom, the ones that sink on top). You can do the same if you like but it really doesn’t matter.

Fill the remainder of the glass or bowl with shaved ice, and make sure it’s filled to the brim. Add some sugar if you want, and then add some milk making sure that it goes all the way down to where the fruits and beans are. You can use fresh milk but Filipinos have been accustomed to the taste of condensed milk which doesn’t spoil easily in the summer heat. You can also use coconut milk. The best halo-halo I have tasted was in a summer vacation in Antique where I had halo-halo that was topped with fresh carabao’s milk. It’s still the best, and I can still feel it in my taste buds even now.

Top off the halo-halo with leche flan, ube, langka or macapuno. You can use all four and even add a scoop of ice cream (with the same flavors, avoid vanilla or chocolate) and some grated cheese. Some halo-halo bowls even have three scoops of ice cream. Never top your halo-halo with a cherry, or a sliced banana unless you are not using the traditional ingredients enumerated above and have made modifications on them. It just doesn’t work.


For a more global rendition on the halo-halo, you can check out past Top Chef contestant Dale Talde’s Americanized take on halo-halo on this video:



It isn't exactly the traditional halo-halo but I guess it works in the same spontaneous and carefree spirit. You can get a complete recipe of Dale's version on the Top Chef website at Bravo.