Food Review - Philippines

8th of October 2011 (Saturday)

I went on a trip with my Senior Pastor to visit the FGT churches in Philippines recently. This was in conjunction with the anniversaries of both FGT Las Piñas & FGT Tondo. Having never been to any part of the Philippines, this was a relatively exciting trip for me and here’s the report on the various foods that we managed to try whilst we were there:

Location:
Max’s Restaurant

Type of Food:
Local Filipino cuisine, sweets and biscuits

On our first night we had dinner at a local fast food restaurant just around the corner from where we were staying called Max’s Restaurant. As the paper table mat implied, apparently it has been around since 1945 which coincidentally means it is as old as the United Nations itself.

Banana Ketchup tastes like bananas and is way sweeter

Max’s Restaurant serves local food but is a franchise, perhaps very much like our local version of The Chicken Rice Shop. For our meal we had the sinigang (meat in a *very* sour broth), kare-kare (oxtail in peanut sauce) and the restaurant’s most famous dish, fried chicken.

I enjoyed the sinigang although I think it might be a bit strong if you’re not into the ham choy soup back home ‘cos its probably 10x as strong. That’s the one in our square bowls scooped out from the pot on the right. I’m not a big fan of peanut sauce but the meat in the kare-kare was tender and nice.

Here’s a picture of the fried chicken, in all honesty this picture was taken the SECOND time we went to Max’s Restaurant because the first time around, by the time I whipped out my camera the fried chicken looked like this… …

… … … I guess it was just THAT good

For desserts, we had the infamous Halo-Halo! which is kinda like ice-kacang back home except it has got a whole slew of different ingredients such as mashed purple yam, caramel, custard, jackfruit, tapioca, red beans and ice-cream.

Thank goodness we took a picture before it was all gone

Verdict:
There were quite a number of things on the menu I haven’t tried yet but as it is I’d go back just to eat the same stuff again (except perhaps the kare-kare). The chicken in particular was amazing, the texture of the skin is dry and crunchy but the chicken meat within remains tender regardless of the part of the chicken you’re eating which feels like you’re eating a cross between a roasted and fried chicken. The sinigang was very addictive to be honest due to its sour nature and coupled with the overall ambience of a family restaurant, Max’s Restaurant was a very enjoyable dining experience indeed.


10th of October 2011 (Monday)

Monday morning saw Jimmy & me wandering the streets of Philippines looking for some local breakfast to consume. Guess where we ended up?

Location:
Jollibee

Type of Food:
Burgers, Fried Chicken, Fries, Finger Food, Desserts

Jollibee is one of the local fast food chains in Philippines, as the country did not impose any halal requirements we decided to go try out a local pork burger to see how it fares. I had the Champ set which comes with a pork burger, regular fries and a soft drink.

Yea it didn’t look like much to me either

To be honest, the meat patty was dry which kinda ruined the burger but hey at least the fries were great. I love fries that are not so fried and more mushed / mashed which was exactly what the fries were in this case. To compensate I ordered a sundae with caramel and chocolate chunky bits which was actually quite nice!

Okay so it doesn’t look nice but it sure was gooooood

Verdict:
The only take away from my experience at Jollibee is that I can now say that I’ve been to it.

Total Bill:
I think the total bill came up to about RM10 after converting which I guess is quite equivalent to local fast food prices in Malaysia.

Other Pictures:
Here are some of the other pictures I took whilst I was in Manila!

This is FGT Las Pinas’ new home

And this is FGT Tondo’s new home

Took a picture of this interesting machine, the oranges in the bin at the back of the machine go to the top (behind the empty bottles), go into the machine, which auto-peels and auto-squeezes very fresh orange juice

The building with a hole in the middle

For the cosplayers of Naruto!

We really wanted to try this but ran out of tummy space and time… Perhaps next time