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To those who like walking, this city offers a choice between getting sideswiped by a jeepney or contracting lung disease. If you want to stretch your legs in the open air you have to take your walk inside one of the ghettoes (Forbes, San Lorenzo etc), eliciting the suspicion of security guards (Not only are you a stranger, but you’re not driving!), or wait until the weekend when the Makati business district is mostly empty.

The UP campus is a great place to walk; getting there in this traffic is a tribulation. (By the way, has the crime situation been dealt with?) We end up going to the mall and walking back and forth, forth and back, seeing the same stores and the same displays over and over until we buy something out of sheer boredom.

A few weeks ago, to relieve our tedium, we decided to take a walk at Bonifacio High Street. The weather must really be broken because this summer is balmy, not infernally hot. Lately it’s been cloudy, which is our favorite weather for walking. We were walking down the street when we noticed this.

We felt like Balboa on first seeing the Pacific Ocean, yes our lives need excitement. The High Street has been extended! And the new complex is actually nice, with wide paths and lots of places for people to sit (Serendra is cramped, fussy and the artworks are too big for the space; the older High St looks like an outlet mall in Nevada).

The new restaurants look interesting: Italian, Japanese, Mediterranean/Asian (Mediterrasian?), Filipino, desserts, juice. We had the Reuben sandwich and the red beet burger, both very good although Ricky thinks the red beet should be served as a wrap rather than a sandwich. Last night Otsu had the salad with caramelized onion tarts and we had the beef belly, both very good. For dessert we had the Cecilia: meringue and coconut cream works.

Another suggestion: The stairs leading to the fountain are nice, just the right height, but at nighttime the edges are hard to see. They need to put more lights (but that would take away the effect of the lights under the plant boxes) or attach some sort of fluorescent thingy on the edges so people with poor depth perception (points to self) don’t stagger.

Laing, 2 ways at Mesa

We’re collaborating with Mike of the Walk and Eat blog on a quest to find the best laing. First we’re going to try the laing served in restaurants in the Metro Manila area.

Laing we’ve tried so far

Mesa
C2
Cafe Bola
Recipes – Forget it. Go straight to General Cho’s chicken.
Via Mare – Forget it. Get the pinais na alimasag.

Of course we’re going to try the laing places recommended by Claude Tayag in Linamnam, but first we’re eating around Metro Manila.

Do you know of a good laing place? Please post recommendations in Comments. Thank you!

On Monday we tried 7 doughnut varieties at J. Co Donuts and Coffee, which opened last week at the Mega Strip, Megamall Bldg B in Mandaluyong. No we did not eat all the doughnuts—we weren’t running a marathon afterwards nor did we have a defibrillator in our bag.

Oh all right, we ate the whole Alcapone and then Franco confiscated the Green Tease. But for all the other flavors we took just one bite each. This required an iron will.

We chased down the doughnuts with a cup of J. Coppucino. We recommend drinking this cappucino without sugar, the better to taste the coffee. The beans are grown in Indonesia, where J. Co was born.

L-R: Mona Pisa, Alcapone

1. Mona Pisa. Our taste buds were primed for doughnut so they got confused: this one has the texture of a doughnut but it tastes like pizza. Weird, but likeable—good for a quick breakfast. (As Munch noted in Law and Order: SVU, coffee and doughnuts is the breakfast of champions.)

2. Alcapone. J. Co’s bestseller in Indonesia, with good reason. Much as we like doughnuts, most doughnut brands are too sweet—after three bites you get a sugar high and start running around the room; 15 minutes later you crash. The Alcapone (as in mascarpone) is just sweet enough, with cream filling and lots of sliced toasted almonds to give it an interesting texture.

Clockwise: Blueberry More, Green Tease, Avocado DiCaprio

3. Blueberry More (like Barrymore, get it?) is a cake doughnut with cream filling topped with blueberry jam. The cake is soft but solid, not airy.

4. Green Tease, as the name proclaims, has a subtle green tea flavor that fools your brain into thinking you’re eating something healthy. It is our credo that all yummy things consumed in moderation are good for you. This is our second favorite in the bunch.

5. Avocado DiCaprio. Strange at first taste, but it grows on you quickly. It would never have occurred to us to fuse the concepts “avocado” and “Leonardo DiCaprio”. By the way do you realize that Titanic came out 15 years ago? So when the 3D reissue opens, teenagers and people in their early 20s will be shocked at skinny young Leo without the grooves between his eyebrows.

L-R: Jacky Chunk, Heaven Berry

6. Jacky Chunk. Chocolatey and peanut-y, a combination that always works.

7. Heaven Berry. Too sweet for us and way too pink.

We also tried the Cheezy Rich. Cake doughnut with four types of cheese equals ensaymada.

All J. Co doughnut varieties cost 42 pesos each. A box of 6 goes for P230, a dozen P350, two dozen P550. Two dozen doughnut holes—J. Pops—cost P250. The Cheezy Rich is P45.

J.Co also serves yogurt with a variety of toppings—we picked lychee. Good way to end our doughnut sampling session—we walked out on our own power, with a box of partially-eaten doughnuts.

We visited Abaca in Cebu last January. It’s a small hotel, exquisitely designed, with good food and a private beach.

Congratulations to our friend Mike at the Walk and Eat blog on completing his quest to eat at all the restaurants in three dining guidebooks. We joined him a few times on his “research” and we had a blast. (“Ang mahal mahal dito tapos ang dinnerware yung makapal, parang sa pansiterya sa kanto.”) Mike’s summation: He liked less than 8 percent of the restaurants he tried. Picky eater. That’s why we’re friends.

And here’s one of the resident cats.

Our sister Cookie is nearing the third trimester of her pregnancy and complaining of being tired. Take a day off work, we told her. Are you insane? she replied. She’s already worried about work piling up when she goes on maternity leave. Obviously the only way to get her to rest was to lock her in a room. So we locked her in a room last Sunday.

The room was actually a Signature Suite at Maxim’s Hotel in Resorts World Manila.

Our sister, brother-in-law and niece took the bedroom; we camped out in the vast living and dining room. Territorial borders had to be defined or we would spend the whole time bickering with our niece. If you’ve ever bickered with a 5-year-old, stop. It’s exhausting.

Cookie with our niece, Mika.

Having woken up too late to catch the breakfast buffet (Niece had already gone off to school with her dad), we had an early lunch at the hotel’s French restaurant, Impressions. Their new Executive Chef Cyrille Soenen (His Cafe Cicou recently transferred to Greenhills) has redone the menu with fail-safe and fuss-free favorites like prime rib and lobster.

Good thing we missed breakfast.

We started with oysters, which were so fresh they needed no drama. Pick up shell, slurp, next.

Then a creamy seafood bisque which tests your table manners because you may want to lick the bowl.

The main course: Prime rib with foie gras and truffled mashed potatoes. The portion was just big enough to be filling but small enough to allow you to stand up after the meal.

Afterwards the staff brought a tray of chocolate whatnots that we mistook for dessert. It wasn’t dessert, it was the appetizer before the main dessert selection of profiteroles drowned in chocolate, flourless chocolate fudge cake, and mango tart. But the main course was so satisfying that to follow it with dessert seemed excessive. So we declined dessert. Incredible but true.

Impressions at Maxim’s is open for lunch and dinner daily. There’s a Sunday brunch buffet (Php 1,888) where you can enjoy prime rib till the cows come home.

Get a copy of Linamnam by Claude Tayag and Mary Ann Quioc.

Linamnam, Php395 at National Bookstores

Proceed to eat your way around the Philippines. This culinary travel guide is arranged by region for easy reference: now you know exactly where to go and what to order. What! You’ve never had the Crispy Itik and Peking Duck at Tindahan ng Itlog ni Kuya in Laguna?? You call yourself a foodie but you’ve never tried the Chupaculo at Ermin Ray Lim Saavedra Home Suite Home Hotel in Zamboanga?? You need this book.

This one we’re saving for Roland Garros

The Map and The Territory, hardcover, Php995 at National Bookstores.

Perfect for those clay court rallies in which one player stands in the 17th arrondisement and the other stands in the 15th, and the ball goes slowly back and forth until one of them dozes off. Kidding. We have to go.

We’re still not sure whether we like Houellebecq but for some reason we can’t not read him.

The Ermine of Czernopol, Php600-something at National Bookstores

Design is the second thing we love about NYRB Books; the novels are the first. We’ve loved Gregor von Rezzori since we happened upon the NYRB reissue of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite; with the return of The Ermine of Czernopol a nearly-forgotten European genius reclaims his place in literature.