Posts tagged with Chinese food
Our family had dinner at Ling Nam along Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City one ordinary Saturday night. There was no occasion, just a spontaneous dinner outside the house. Chinese food (Cantonese in particular) is the best. If there’s one cuisine I can live with, it’s Chinese.
There’s always something fascinating I find with Binondo. Its being Manila’s Chinatown definitely sets it apart from the city’s other districts, it almost feels like another foreign place, but then it’s just unmistakably very Manila.
The Big Binondo Food Wok is one of the “walking tours” of Old Manila Walks conducted by Ivan Mandy. The tour takes guests around the streets of Chinatown and allows them to take in the sights and sounds while enriching one’s mind with bits of history lessons and trivia and while nibbling on unique Binondo treats.
The tour started off with a brief introductory history lesson at Plaza Calderon dela Barca, which was continued across the street at the historic Binondo Church. Ironically, as Ivan Mandy points out, the baroque Catholic cathedral is Chinatown’s most prominent landmark. It, however, features a bell tower that has pagoda-like characteristics.
The first food stop was Eng Bee Tin‘s second-floor cafe, which is also called the volunteer firemen’s coffee shop. The cafe pays tribute to the volunteer firemen of Chinatown. The earnings of the place are donated to the firemen. There, we had kiampong or salted rice, which didn’t turn out to be that salty, but really tasty nonetheless, eaten together with fishball soup.
The next food stop was Dong Bei Dumplings, the now acclaimed hole-in-the-wall restaurant of a couple from Northern China which serves authentic Chinese cuisine distinct from the Canton-type of Chinese food most of us are familiar with. Guests will be served, well, dumplings. I’ve been to the place twice before, so I knew what was coming. Nonetheless, Dong Bei dumplings are always a unique treat.
Once we found ourselves back in Quiapo, we decided to have mami and siopao at the old and infamous Ma Mon Luk restaurant along Quezon Boulevard.
The place has been un-airconditioned since time immemorial because, according to a magazine clipping posted on Ma Mon Luk’s wall, airconditioning affects the noodle soup’s taste. For a decent price, the bowl of noodles was quite filling. Though, as to taste, I don’t think there was anything extraordinarily special about the soup. Perhaps it’s all about the nostalgia of having a bowl full of the ‘original’ mami of Manila. The siopao was meaty and quite filling too.
After having merienda, I parted ways with my friends and walked across Quezon Boulevard, took some last snapshot of Quiapo, and boarded an FX back to Quezon City. That was a pretty tiring but satisfying spontaneous walking tour.
law student, national democracy activist, film school graduate, photography hobbyist