Happy birthday tomorrow, Pat-P!

We chose Independence Day to eat in a Filipino restaurant, in a city where Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, American, and Korean flavors add an extra ingredient to the air of a fiesta on every street corner every day, any day.

If in the nascent days of civilization a family needed a pathfinder, a hunter, and a gatherer to source and cook the ingredients for a satisfying meal, we elected cousin Ann to play all three roles for us in our search for something familiar but something new along restaurant row.

She did not blink when she piped up to say, “I know just the place!”

At 11:15, we were given a table. Fifteen minutes later, when I looked up from my iced tea, I saw a queue of six or seven persons standing a few meters from the door of the restaurant. I didn’t ask the waiter if they were “chance passengers” waiting for us to make an early exit or if they had a reservation for 12 noon.

Cousin Ann, who was not paying any attention to them, went straight to the task at hand, suggesting a soup, a salad, a chicken dish and a meat dish, to be followed by dessert. Who was I to question her choices?

When the food came — rather quickly, I must say — I was impressed by the presentation. Every dish looked delectable! But specially the salad of cucumber and pomelo, dressed with a few lacy leaves of coriander. Quite an artistic presentation it was, light colors tossed together by a pair of light, ladylike (?) hands. Then came the shrimp sinigang flavored with guavas – how many cooks bother to look for fresh bayabas in the palengke first thing in the morning?

Our main dish was fried chicken which, according to my mother (and yours), may seem like a simple dish but it can be tricky. The chicken that landed on our table looked most ordinary — crispy on the outside, warm and tender inside. I detected a hint of patis — the secret ingredient in the marinade?

For dessert, Paul had sago’t gulaman, which he described as having a minty taste, which he liked. Enough reason, he said, to go back to Siklab at Shangri-la; in English, it means Flare.