MEDIUM RARE

It pays – in peso and centavo terms – to know how much you can eat and how little you may waste of the food on your plate.

As the only Daza who cannot and does not cook, who’s not even a fullfledged foodie, it was nice to discover, under the guidance of a food tripper who discovers lots of things on TikTok, that there’s a restaurant that charges you by the gram for every leaf, every bite, every spoonful or twirl of the chopsticks. At this place called No. 1 Malatang – serving Chinese food but business born in Australia – the charge is ₱1.30 per gram.

I wouldn’t know what a gram of food worth ₱1.30 tastes like, but of the three of us who ate that day in their Greenhills mall location, my meal must’ve been the cheapest. Prices aside, there are 72 ingredients to pick from, everything from veggies to chicken to meat to seafood, from plain squid ball to squid ball stuffed with mushroom to “squid flower,” you get the drift.

Additionally, there are six soup bases – choose one – and into your bowl (of considerable size) you add noodles or congee. Spicy, no spice, mildly spicy? The choice is yours. You can choose a dry noodle, too. What the restaurant calls a salad is a tiny bowl of thinly sliced cucumber drizzled in olive (or peanut) oil. You have garlic sauce or chopped peanuts to add to your concoction. The garlic sauce sounded inviting, but maybe another day. . .

For the three of us, the bill came up to ₱2,200, give or take a few pesos, roughly ₱733 for each. We had consumed a total of 563.85 grams, a little over half a kilogram.

For dessert, we moved to another spot – a counter selling watermelon juice, with bits of lychee anchored at the bottom of the cup, priced at ₱149 each, a reminder of summer just gone and the conclusion to a meal that had left a salty aftertaste on my tongue.

Individually, our meal cost more than one day’s minimum daily wage, but if people with a bit of money to spend on essential and non-essential things did not eat out now and then, what would happen to the economy?