the last buffet?

My doctor just told me that since I started seeing her two years ago, this is the fattest I've ever been. And the heaviest. With the highest cholesterol levels.

How did this happen? Enter Umu, the Dusit Thani Manila Hotel's Japanese restaurant.

Very serene with a view of the garden. Thanks, Steph, for booking this table for us.

I took La Familia to the Crossover Buffet on 18 July 2010. By "crossover", they mean that you can stuff yourself with eats from the hotel's four restaurants-- Umu, Benjarong for Thai, Tosca for Italian, and Basix for Continental. Two are on the ground floor, two are on the second floor. Walking through the lobby with food and drink in hand are unavoidable.

Let the games begin!

Plate No. 1 Lamb chops. Tough and gamey.

Plate No. 2 Assorted dimsum steamed to order. Bland and mushy.

Plate No. 3 Prime rib. Dry as cardboard.

Plate No. 4 Gindara teriyaki and edamame. OK lang.

Plate No. 5 Pomelo salad, green mango salad and fried papaya strips. I was actually craving for some authentic papaya salad. Nada.

Plate No. 6 Freshly stir-fried pad thai. It was good, but I've had better in a food court in Bangkok.

Plate No. 7 An assortment of desserts. The mango sticky rice was a major disappointment. The white rice-cake thingy and the flourless chocolate cake were passable. The meringue tart thingy? I don't even remember it.

Brother said: "Why do we keep eating at hotel buffets? It's no joke trying to lose weight nowadays."

Father said: "People are crossing the lobby with plates full of food. Whose stupid idea was this?"

Steph (silent H) said: "The buffet is cheaper than ordering a la carte from a single restaurant."

I say: From now on, we will no longer partake of the trough-like offerings at hotel chains. Instead, we will eat fabulously expensive food at specialty restaurants. Hopefully, we will eat less, but better.

greenhills for the day

On my last afternoon in Manila, we went to Greenhills for some shopping and chow. To me, Unimart, Greenhills Shopping Center and Virra Mall-- no matter how much they renovate them-- will always be the last bastion of the 80s. Walking around these places brings me back to grade school and high school, when there were no giant SM malls yet, and our idea of a good time was Pizza Hut followed by a movie on the top floor of Virra Mall, buying a comic book at Filbar's and then a sundae from the first McDonald's in the Philippines.

Of course, it's not exactly the same as before. But the essence is still there. I guess Greenhills is now what kids would call "kinda retro".

Anyhoo, I ventured inside the Greenhills Theatre Mall to grab some Big Daddy's Chicken, which Jin Perez salivated over, here.

Regular chicken chop

Chili chicken chop

Pretty good! We ate them as they were, without any sauce or sidings. I can imagine bringing them home to eat over rice or pasta or even a nice green salad, or serving them plain with some beer. The chili ones were particularly addicting.

A couple of stalls away was Bread Connection. Oh, that brought back memories. The Bread Connection sandwiches were Ma's default take-out meal for us kids when we had gone through all the take-out and delivery menus in the kitchen drawer and wanted something else. I'll be sure to get me some bacon and egg on round (yes, round) white bread next trip.


Dinner was at Gloria Maris across Unimart. Pop had a hankering for hotpot. Check out the condiments:

Clockwise: Fresh red chilis, chili garlic oil, peanut sauce, satay sauce, garlic and spring onions

Ma ordered the set for four (which looked to me like four pieces of everything), plus some extra fatty beef and fish balls.


We had two kinds of soup, plain and spicy. We dumped everything in.


My gripe is that some of the ingredients in the set were not what we wanted to eat, e.g. the scary tentacles. The other table had lobster balls and veggies ONLY for their hotpot. I wanted to make friends and join them. The set is probably cheaper and makes decision-making easier, compared to ordering all the components individually, but wouldn't it be worth the added effort and moolah to have a hotpot where every scrap of meat and vegetable was consumed-- and with excitement and gusto?

(Note to self: Must try lobster balls next time.)

Still, waste not want not, so we ate it all. Except the tentacles.


At the end of the meal, we were full to bursting, sweaty and smelly. All signs of a satisfactory hotpot experience.

cats @ ccp

At 12 noon, the skies opened up over Manila and it rained, very hard, for about two hours. Pop got caught in a flash flood along EDSA. He very graciously offered to drive Ma and me to the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) which is at the end of the world, relative to our house in the north. The next day, I read in the newspaper that had the rain not stopped at 2PM, the whole city would have been under water again, like last year's Typhoon Ondoy.

We reached the CCP at 6PM. That gave us time to have an early dinner before the show. We had a hard time settling on a place to eat. Most of the restaurants in the CCP's lot were full. The servers didn't even bother to look up anymore when new people walked in their doors, they were (feeling) so busy. Some of the restaurants even had leaks from the ceiling and wet floors. We ended up at Teriyaki Boy where the food was barely Japanese and very mediocre, but the staff were friendly, fast and efficient.

Image borrowed from hubpages.com

The CCP is still a magnificent structure, but badly needs some updating. The carpets are kind of old, the escalators can only accommodate one person on each step, and the chairs are creaky and lumpy. We found our seats in the balcony and realised that the railing blocks everyone's view of the front portion of the stage. So the whole balcony section was literally sitting on the edge of their seats.

Image borrowed from skyscrapercity.com

Act I of Cats Now And Forever was boring. I really tried to like it, having paid so much for tickets, but that Jellicle Song can drive you nuts. The set was the same throughout, so that in the beginning, you are amused by the giant pile of garbage that is the setting for the Jellicle Ball, but after 20 minutes, you become aware that it's just a giant pile of Jellicle garbage. The dancing was great, but I couldn't understand the songs' lyrics. Maybe because of the imported performers' Australian accents?

The Chinese ladies sitting behind us wouldn't stop yapping until Ma and I shushed them. One of them very loudly insisted that she "can't see anything!" Two seats away on my right was a twenty-something kid who kept giggling and saying "Ang kulet!" in all the wrong places. The big fat guy sitting behind Ma kept kicking her chair, but when I turned around to give him the evil eye, he was freaking asleep.

At that point, I already regretted being there. I don't even like cats (the animals). Rum Tum Tugger, who is supposed to be really hot and makes the girl cats crazy, just looks very, very gay. Although the cat costumes were fantastic, I didn't understand why the older cats wore mangy robes that made them look like Wookies.

In between songs, we could hear a very distinct female voice (Australian accent) giving stage and lighting directions. It was distracting, to say the least. "OK, let's go to Old Deuteronomy, at the count of one, two..."

Lea Salonga finally came out and sang a few lines. And then intermission.

Image borrowed from pep.ph

During the break, the women to my left started to discuss "Inception", which is the best movie that I've seen this year. One of them said that she had a hard time understanding the dream-within-a-dream premise, so her seatmate started to explain it, but then she was interrupted by "Oh, don't bother. I go to the movies to be entertained, not to think." I wanted to stand up, slap her and say, "Please do the human race a favor and don't reproduce!"

Act II was sublime. It was like a completely different musical. Even the audience shut up and paid more attention. The Australian director lady's voice was heard no more. The cats themselves were more interesting, and they changed the set a bit-- Growltiger on a ship with some Siamese cats, and Skimbleshanks on a night train. One of the younger cats sang a reprise of Lea's big song "Memory". Actually, the melody was "Memory" but I couldn't catch the lyrics until the people in the orchestra section started applauding. Ah, they changed the words to Tagalog pala, sung with a heavy Australian accent. Highly appreciated by the audience, but it would have been better if they let a Filipina sing this part, I think.

At last, the part that we had all been waiting for, what we had actually paid for-- Lea Salonga sang "Memory" in full. It was divine. Every word was crisp and sharp. The tone of her voice gave me goosebumps. It was perfection.

Suddenly, the Ilonggo couple sitting beside me started to converse. The guy said to his girlfriend, "Hey, have you checked your Facebook lately? I posted blah blah blah..." in the middle of the THREE-THOUSAND PESO SONG!

The girl, perhaps feeling that I was on the verge of stabbing her boyfriend with the ballpoint pen in my purse, puts a hand on the guy's arm to quiet him down. And then she crossed her legs and started swinging her bare foot. Bare foot! Yun pala she was wearing flipflops. At the CCP. Madame Imelda Marcos would throw a fit.

Image borrowed from ticketworld.com.ph

The show ended just before 1030PM. Pop had been waiting for us at Starbucks for three hours. Although it was still drizzling, there was no traffic and we were home by 11PM. All in all, I'd say that I'm glad I went. Yez, Lea Salonga is so good that her three-minute performance could stand on its own. She didn't even need a supporting cast. Which makes me think that maybe next time I should watch one of her concerts and just enjoy her singing, without the annoying Jellicle cats.

I had much more fun at Legally Blonde. And it was cheaper, too.

what i'm reading

One of the best things about living in the Philippines is the bookstores. There are the big chains like Fully Booked, Powerbooks and National Bookstore. And there are the secondhand stores like Book Sale. And finally, there are the third-, fourth- and fifth-hand book stalls along Recto Avenue.

There are books everywhere, and even brand-new books are really cheap. What's printed on a book as US$9.99 translates to PHP399. And if you can wait a while, there's sure to be a sale somewhere, and you can get the same book for only PHP320. If your need isn't urgent, and if the book you want is an extremely popular bestseller or an enduring classic, then give it a year or two, and it shows up at Book Sale for less than PHP100.

And more and more commonly these days, we have these e-books that you can download. Let's not go there now.

Which brings me to my point: A brand-spanking-new book wrapped in plastic with an uncreased spine is a true luxury. It excites the senses. Your eyes light up at the sight of the shiny cover with the artwork that demands to be framed, or at the very least, cherished. Yes, many years later, when someone mentions the title, you immediately recall the cover.

You crack it open, and inhale the fresh paper and ink smell. And you know that as time passes, although the new-book scent dissipates, the fragrance eau de oldbook is just as provocative.

You start reading: the reviews, the list of previous works, the title page, the introduction... before you stop and tell yourself to save that book for the perfect circumstances-- a comfortable armchair, an adjustable reading lamp, a rainy night. After all, you paid full price (or close to it) for the pleasure that must be savored.

You get into the story (for all books are essentially stories) and somewhere near the middle, you notice with regret that you are almost done. You want to slow down, but your eyes take in the words at a faster pace, practically tearing the text off the pages.

And then you're finished. You close the book and pat it lightly on its cover. Good job! See you again in a couple of years. Yes, I will reread you.

You grab the next new book from your pile.

My new books. Bought on sale... mostly.

Update: pinthoughts asked for a book review, so here it is. At first, I thought of doing one-word reviews, like this, but I'm feeling chatty.

1. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman-- This book feels more Pratchett than Gaiman, actually. The story, style and tone remind me of Pratchett's Discworld series, occasionally colored by Gaiman's gloom and doom. Although Good Omens has a world-wide cult following, Pratchett's light-heartedness and Gaiman's sinister depression don't go together for me.

2. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova-- In one word, TEDIOUS. OK, I get it. It's a redux of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Unfortunately, it's a pale, pale version. Kostova does have a talent for description, though. I especially enjoyed the parts where she wrote about Istanbul's architecture. As a travel writer, she's quite good.

3. Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova-- In one word, TEDIOUSER. It's been on my bedside table for months now, and I'm still barely halfway. I'm seriously thinking about not finishing it.

4. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger-- This woman can't write. The premise is very interesting: Star-crossed lovers, time travel-- what's not to like? But the way she writes is pure fluff. (Doesn't anyone write LITERATURE anymore?) Maybe the movie is better.

5. Tender At The Bone by Ruth Reichl-- Really, really good. I first encountered Ruth Reichl on one of those Food Network or Travel Network shows. She speaks in a boring monotone and she's not very good-looking, sorry. But the way she writes! She's sexy, funny, and very, very interesting. I would read this book over and over again. It's not so much a "food" book as a "growing pains" type of book.

6. The Nasty Bits and Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain-- I've been a Bourdain fan since Kitchen Confidential, and these two books do not disappoint. All of his books have been reviewed to death, and Tony has firmly established himself as a rock star in the culinary world-- and he doesn't even cook anymore. Medium Raw contains his classic essay "So You Wanna Be A Chef". Do yourselves a favor and go to the link right now. Email it to your friends and family, and especially to those who are thinking of going to culinary school. Go on, read it NOW.

stopping time

It's the strangest thing. For over a decade, I was told that I looked the same as I did in my early 20s (Naks!) and then suddenly, a couple of months ago, I noticed fine lines around my eye-- Gasp! Take note that it's only one eye, the left one.

I didn't know that wrinkles would show up this way-- without warning and out of the blue. One minute you believe that you're as hot as you were in high school. The next minute, you have "character lines" under your left eye. WTH.

So I went out and got myself the entire Olay Regenerist line. The five products that I bought cost almost as much as a meal for two at Antonio's. That depressed me.


I always thought that Olay Regenerist was a product line that's geared towards more mature women like, say, my mother. But now... Waaaahhh!

Our friend Bry the Shrinking Man works for Proctor & Gamble and swears that Olay Regenerist performed as well as the nose-bleedingly expensive Creme de la Mer in their tests. (A jar of La Mer would cost as much as a meal for the whole family at Antonio's.) Granted that Bry has worked for P&G his entire adult life and may seriously believe that everything you need to survive in this world is being manufactured by P&G.

Now the problem is REMEMBERING to use the Cream Cleanser, Eye Lifting Serum, Regenerating Serum, Regenerating Cream with SPF15 and the Micro Sculpting Cream every freaking day. So much work just to try to stop time.