start of a new journey

Saturday 10 November 2007

Because I egged Anina to start this blog going after so many months of talking about it I get the privilege of posting its first serious entry. I will turn 62 in a couple of months and this is my first attempt to ever write a blog.

We decided as a family to start this blog mainly so we can track the places where we go to eat when we have our Sunday dinner after Mass. I am a widower with four children who I describe as ALPS (adults living with parent),Javier, Cholo, Anina and Mikey. My wife Marlene died five years ago and I guess the Sunday mass and dinner have become a part of our family coping mechanism to deal with such an early loss.

A younger sister Didi who was widowed two years ago also lives with us and is part of this foodie group.

But today was not Sunday, it just happened that we went to visit Marlene's grave at Loyola Memorial in Marikina for All Saints Day, We finished the visit at half past twelve and everyone was quite hungry. The decision of where to go for a meal can be quite involved because each of us have our own preferences and we tend to talk a lot about things in this family particularly about Food.

I had wanted to go to Mario's Kitchen at Tiendesitas because I like their Sopa Buena. Anina had objections but she did not indicate a preference although she eventually said she wanted to go to Pho Hoa in Eastwood. The guys did not have any particular choice so the decision was to go to Mario's Kitchen.

On the way to Mario's Kitchen we got to talking about another restaurant in the same area called Forest House where we had eaten before but not as a complete family (Mikey and Cholo hadnt). The attraction with Forest House was its bagnet and its Baguio like ambiance. Exercising my father authority it was decided to go to Forest House.

It was almost one in the afternoon and we were the first customers for the day. Although more people came in after us (it is a general observation that when the family goes to an empty restaurant in a short while it gets full, sort of like the way flies are attracted to you know what)
The air conditioning was not on yet and the waiter was tying his necktie as he showed us to our table.

We ordered our food and as a rule I will not talk about the food we ordered
unless it is remarkable or it is extremely bad. We are not food critics we are just a family that like to eat good food adventurous enough to keep on looking for new places to try.

Our story for this restaurant is what happened to Cholo's salpicado. After going through the appetizers, soup and salad, almost an hour into the meal the waiter comes back with the menu and tells Cholo the salpicado was not available. For some reason things like this happen to Cholo in restaurants. Cholo was obviously upset and I tried to appease him by calling for the Manager who was not in, So we called the Chef who was quite apologetic and told him about our displeasure.

We were too hungry to get really upset about the situation so Cholo made his second choice,the baby back ribs. Our entrees came and we went about our meal (we were really hungry) noisily as usual. Anina was not happy with her fish and chips and I was telling her it was difficult to find good fish in Baguio restaurants.

The general consensus was the food was average and because of the salpicado incident the meal experience was rated to be slightly below average.We decided not to have dessert. After getting the bill the waiter came back with two plates of ice cream and rum cake compliments of the house. Suddenly we were going to have dessert. ( madali pala kaming makalimot)

I will end here because my mind is starting to fall asleep although I was toying with idea to use the salpicado incident as a point to explain why we us a country cannot compete in a global market. Good night folks.