Archives for Food

Sink the Bismarck: Unboxing a case from Brewdog

This post is dedicated to Helga, Fritz, Peter, Ade, Anne, Marco S., Rico, Marco P., Bim, Lauren and the rest of The Man Blog. It is also dedicated to all the friends and clients I have drank with in the past several years especially to you, Mark P., Brad and Markku!

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Illy Coffee Pods: You recommended ‘em so I got ‘em!

Thanks to everyone who chimed in Facebook recommending Illy. It’s hard to find coffee pods off the shelf in your friendly neighborhood grocery so I was pleasantly surprised to see the boxes of Illy stacked. I probably have seen these before thinking they were regular coffee grind, in which case I prefer beans. So yay, new pods for the handpresso. A box sets you back PHP 600.00 for 18 coffee pods. That’s about PHP 33.00 for a shot of espresso. Not bad. The cheapest I’ve seen was PHP 25.00 per shot at the department store of Rustan’s.

The Epic Espresso Dessert

OK let’s take a break from tech. Here’s an epic dessert idea I came up with which I shared with Paolo Manzano of HWM during the Samsung OMNIA II seminar. This is a variation of a dessert idea where you drown a serving of ice cream with a shot of espresso. Paging Lori!

So the first thing you need to do is grind fresh coffee beans enough for one shot of espresso. Remember, just grind, but don’t press yet.

You can use ice cream for this, but in my case I made it more interesting and bought one of these from the Korean grocery store near my house. I don’t even know what these are called, but they’re yummy. Open the pack and cut it up into two pieces so that it fits into the bowl. Cut however you like. Stacking them together is fine too.

EDIT: The ice cream dessert bar is called PPANG TTO AH. Thanks to Min Kim for translating!

Next, make the espresso. The trick is to dump the espresso into the bowl, fresh from machine so that it stays hot. Prepare the bowl first and then make the shot. Then finally, pour the espresso into the bowl, spreading the heart around your ice cream.

Add some whipped cream and there you have it, “ice cream something something drowned in espresso!”

TADAH!

Vue Bar: Displacing Makati into the South

Prepare for some temporal displacement, south people. Vue Bar is a hint of the Makati life brought into the Bellevue Hotel in Filinvest. A little bird told me about this place recently opening at the beginning of the month so we decided to check it out last night (before simbang gabi!).

The “view” of Vue Bar is the Northgate cyberzone alive with the flashes of call center flair.

It’s a little eerie to find a posh bar in the south with a dress code. Usually, shorts and slippers are the main staple adorned with less than PHP50.00 beer (San Mig Light here is PHP90.00), but of course, there’s always a price for ambiance and this is a fresh takeaway from the usual BF / Alabang / Muntinlupa scene.

Vue Bar is located at the 22nd floor of The Bellueve Hotel. It is open from 5PM till 1AM. Dress code: no slippers, sando, shorts.

McDonald’s in Greenbelt has finally reopened!

Finally, they’re open again. The McDonald’s in front of AIM and beside Greenbelt has been a fixture since childhood. I asked the guard and they said they’ve been open since December 1. These photos were taken on the morning of December 4. The “new” store design is accented by wider spaces and more diverse seating choices.

So nice to know I can go back to my morning Big Breakfast fix when I’m in Makati.

My First Pump Espresso Machine: Krups XP 4050

I’ve been drooling over the delight of making my own espresso for more than 8 months. Today I gave in. This buy, thought seemingly impulse, was well calculated. Am I making sense? Must be the caffeine.

P.S. Lori — I found my beans. Unless I can get more of that Benguet coffee, I’ve stuck with CBTL’s house blend. It’s buttery. Just how I like it! Thank you for your advice

Recalling childhood in Amici and Fr. Colombo

When I was little, part of my routine with dad would be to accompany him to the office. Going to office with dad was considered the highlight of the week. This was mainly because dad’s office always had the most advanced computers. When he was working in Makati, he had one of the first IBM XT computers that could boot up Load Runner and Dig Dug. When he was with PCSO, we had a machine that could run Civilization, Police Quest III and Flashback without lag.

Ah those were the days. My childhood was definitely highlighted by geeky insertions, but of all the offices that my dad held, one comes to mind — the one in Makati near AIM, for the sole reason that he’d walk me to Don Bosco to meet the friars, not to go to confession, but to indulge in perhaps the best ice cream (later on I found out it was called gelato) I’ve ever had in their little restaurant, Amici.

Amici because a staple meeting place for my dad’s barkada. It served as a waypoint to such an extent that if he was “lost,” he was most probably found in Amici. And there was good reason for this — my dad knew the friars including Fr. Colombo himself, and the staff of cooks and waiters who have been there for ages. They’d always send in extra heaps of pasta for my dad’s friends, and would overflow my little paper cup with gelato — so much ice cream that tested the physics of mass and density if I had only asked. His group composed mostly of high school friends and members of the Defensores Fidei foundation that teaches Catholic apologetics, of maybe some of you are familiar. Nonetheless, Amici was forever forged in my childhood as the most affordable best-kept-secret since the 80′s.

It was only recently — in industry terms that Amici grew in popularity. You see, since it was run by the friars, it was what you could barely call a business. I assume they were at least breaking even, but the store hours were odd as they only opened for lunch, closed for “siesta” and then opened again for about another hour in the afternoon before closing right before dinner.

When I started working, Amici had grown into a full restaurant, serving both Filipino and Italian dishes and thank heavens, had more decent store hours like any regular restaurant. I saw Fr. Colombo less, but one time after accidentally parking the car in a wrong spot, my post-dinner walk back was affronted by a huge pice of paper stuck on my wiper saying “Next time look at the sign or else I’ll punch out your tires!!” Let’s just say that if anyone of you met Fr. Colombo, well … there. You’d know.

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I rarely go up north, past Makati. So one time, when I had to meet the fine people behind Virtuoso to discuss the blog awards and to pick up the Sony Marine Pack for review, they took me to a relatively new restaurant called Cara Mia. I didn’t know it was part of the Amici group up until I saw the menu offering and the familiar gelateria bar which served, the classic items they had (i.e. Ferrero gelato!) plus cakes, which previously were not available.

I had heard of the Amici franchise being bought and scaled up into a real chain of restaurants. I guess that’s how things really are these days, and the “oldies” like me were of course a bit skeptical on the quality of the “authentic” Italian feel. No longer could Fr. Colombo sprinkle an excess amount of bacon and Italian ham on top of your pizza if he liked you. No more extra scoops. But business is business and what they’ve done to Amici, I must honestly say, is not bad, not bad at all.

Sure the food tastes slightly different. And yes the prices are a bit higher, but there are a few classic elements that were retained (i.e. how soft drinks were sold by the liter to share, big tables since they assume you’re never dining alone, no WiFi to “inspire conversation”). In essence it is still the same restaurant.

“Cara Mia” is apparently the gelateria line, but they serve the same food despite the different name, so I really don’t know what the difference is. Maybe it’s for tax purposes. Heh.

Parting with the old Amici is bittersweet. I mean, the name is still there. The food may taste a little different (it’s still good, by the way), but you can no longer look back into the kitchen window to see a familiar fat friar mixing a big vat of pasta sauce, adding that extra fistful of Italian ham when he knows you’ve arrived.

Unboxing Lachi’s Sans Rival from Davao City (PHP 285)

I’m no food reviewer, but it doesn’t take an expert to know if something’s good — like REALLY GOOD. I recently came from a Davao Food Tour organized by good friends from the Mindanao blogging contingent. I hand carried one whole Sans Rival from a nice little place called Lachi’s. Some of the foodies who went coined Lachi’s as the “Conti’s of Davao.” That’s actually very close to the truth, in my humble opinion as someone who is barely exposed to the rudiments of gastronomy.
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Twenty One Plates by Tinette Villanueva-Miciano

Editor’s Note: Oh no, I’m being sucked in further into writing about gastronomy … O tempora! O mores!

Tinette Villanueva (now Miciano) was a former professor from college, and like most teacher-student relationships in UA&P, we (students + young faculty) all pretty much became a close knit group outside of class. Add the fact that Tinette was moderator for the theater org — AND it was also known fact that she cooked very well. She used to bring batches of her sun dried tomato pasta to our strat plan meetings — and now the updated version of her recipe is in the menu of her newly opened restaurant, Twenty One Plates.
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Nitrogen Ice Cream at Zenses

So so geeky! Thus, this restaurant deserves a post. There’s also a Plurk thread discussing reactions.

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So Anton Diaz asked me out on a date. Don’t worry — it wasn’t a HOT date. It was actually pretty cold. More than 100 degrees below zero cold.

We were both a little early for a meeting so after editing my last slide, Anton huddled me down to the next door restaurant – Zenses Neo Shanghai Cuisine. It really didn’t strike my eye at first as a place that had great ice cream and drinks. But Anton is pretty good at sniffing these places out, so I tagged along for some nitrogen powered ice cream.

Chef OJ is an applied physics major who really dresses for the occasion. I just had to take photos and write this down for everyone else to try. The place has been open since October 2008. If you want to know the details of our Osmanthus Ice Cream (P480.00 for two orders) and the Zenses Sweater (P240.00) which Anton ordered, check out his detailed review.

As for me, I just wanted to shoot! Check these out:
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Believe it or not: BEER Ice Cream from Elfav (!!!)

At 3% alcohol, the P60.00 per scoop ice cream is the only one of its kind that comes with a warning label: 18 years and above only.

I wrote about Elfav a couple of days ago, being happy that we finally have a decent malt shop in the south. Elfav is short for El Favorito, that brand of ice cream that Filipinos may be familiar with – especially to suppliers. Have you ever tried the ice cream sandwiches from Brother’s Burger? Well, the ice cream between the cookies is El Favorito. So today, we got to indulge in a few scoops of ice cream, P99.00 T Bone steak and eggplant lasagna.

So how does it taste, Jayvee?? Well … ummm … It tastes like lager beer. 3% alcohol. The concept of ice cream with alcohol isn’t alien as we have the liquor based flavors like Bailey’s for instance. But beer? Wow.

Definitely not something I’d order on a regular basis – but yeah, it does taste good. Imagine a bottle of beer chilled with the Beer Below Zero technology – and freeze that moment (pun intended!). That’s exactly what the ice cream tastes like.

So I had to ask – yes they can manufacture a batch of this for your private parties. You need to tell them a week in advance.