This is a little joint on Main Street just south of Broadway. A few years ago another Filipino restaurant opened up a few streets south on Main Street. It was more upscale and pricey, but it has since closed down. There is another Filipino restaurant called Cucina on Joyce that we may have to try out sometime. I'm not very familiar with Filipino cuisine apart from a vague conception of satays, so I'm very interested in sampling any Filipino restaurant I encounter. And luckily there are a few in Vancouver.
It's hard to recommend this place, which is disappointing, because it's one of the few authentic Filipino restaurants I know of in Vancouver, and it's not a fancy bistro but a buffet-style eatery, having instead a fairly large selection of authentic Filipino dishes prepared and on display. I would have liked to be able to have a reliable little Filipino place to be able to have available to come back to every once in a while. But I don't envision myself coming back to this place.
Our recent visit there didn't endear us to the place for a number of reasons. When we walked in, it took literally about five minutes until anybody paid any attention to us. There is no menu - what is in the buffet is all there is available. There are about 20 different items, and none of them have any labels whatsoever - no title, no ingredients. Asking about each of the titles seemed to harass the lady behind the counter, and there was a line of people waiting, which put pressure on you not to ask too many questions.
I know next to nothing about Filipino cuisine, so this made it very difficult to make a decision based on anything but appearance, which can be deceptive. Something that looks good might be scary - one of the decent-looking dishes turned out, upon inquiry, to be a mash of liver and heart or something.
I wound up blindly choosing two items, as did Kweepo. The food at this place is food court level. It feels like it should be $5.99 for two items, like it would be at a food court. The problem is that it's $8.99 for two items, plus a dollar extra for one each of an Empanada (a vegetable-filled pastry) and Lumpia (a thin egg roll), which are staples that it would be unthinkable to omit if you want to have an authentic Filipino meal, as we did. The lady was sneaky - when I asked what these items were, she grabbed them and put them in my plate and said "They're good, you try?" I was tempted to say no just to protest the rudeness of her action, but decided not to make a big deal out of it. I wanted to try them anyway.
Another problem is that a lot of the stuff doesn't look fresh. It looks kind of burned and dry, like it's been sitting there for a few hours. Paying $8.99 for two small portions of this stuff with a huge pile of rice doesn't feel like a good deal. For that price I'd expect it to be an all-you-can-eat buffet. Another thing that disturbed us is that, after placing Kweepo's two items on the plate, the lady behind the counter proceeded to place the plate in the microwave and microwave it. Isn't the point of a hot buffet that it's supposed to be hot and ready to eat? And on top of that, microwaving food in plain sight of the customer seems a breach of restaurant etiquette. You're not supposed to microwave food to begin with, much less do it right in front of the customer.
As for the food, I got pepper chicken and a tomato sauce meat dish. Both were fairly good, but WAY oversalted. The chicken was very good, but paradoxically, it was very dry when chewed despite swimming in an oily sauce. The beef was well cooked but they left big pieces of fat on each piece, which I personally do not care for, though I know other people might not mind.
The combo came with a broth-like soup that I almost gagged on when I tried to have a taste because it was so insanely salty. Kweepo got barbecued chicken and tofu & green bean. The tofu & green bean were completely ordinary and unremarkable, but the barbecued chicken was tender and well seasoned, if also oversalted. What is it with Filipino cuisine and salt? I bought some salted tamarind confections from a Filipino grocery store further south on Main today, and they are so disgustingly oversalted I couldn't even eat one.
At the very least, I can't deny that the food here feels authentic. Everyone in the restaurant apart from me and Kweepo were Filipinos, testament to the fact that this is one of the places that is apparently frequented by the expat Filipino community that lives around this neighborhood. There are things there that I've never seen anywhere else and that I'm sure are very authentic. For that alone it is worth at least one visit. I just wish they would improve on the saltiness thing, and wish there was a way to take small samples of various dishes instead of being limited to getting only two items and a big serving of rice.
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