The gourmand would know better than to eat at the food court of a mall.  Granted that there are good places to eat at a food court (like, say, Pao Tsin), the best places to eat are still in those hole-in-the-wall eateries at side streets, or those swanky places where service water probably comes off the toilet.  Or you can cook your own food.  But if you’re a writer with an eight-hour job that gives you repetitive stress injury, and if you have to commute through the EDSA-SM Fairview route every damn day, you have no choice but to eat in food courts.

It’s my brand of emo.

I do need to point out that whatever redeeming value that there is in food court cuisine is canceled out by three important details:

• Food is too expensive.
• Food looks the same.
• Food tastes like shit.

*     *     *

I make no if’s or but’s about it: I love squid.  I succumb to the androgyny of culinary lihi every now and then for a food best described as… well, phallic (don’t get me wrong, I’m straight, and my sexual preference is inclined towards women with mesmerizing eyes, shining hair… I’m getting ahead of myself).  In my search for my favorite seafood (and cheap West cigarettes), I found myself at Galleria with a canteen plate and squid “tempura” at a kiosk called Mandarin Express.

I always thought tempura was a Japanese thing, but you can’t argue with advertising.  For P76, this plate o’ food must be worth it.  Then again, I’m expecting too much from food courts.  I made some mental notes as the attendant prepared my obscenely expensive plate o’ food:

• The squid was precooked.
• The canteen plate was doused - literally - with what looked like sweet chili sauce.
• The anemic-looking precooked squid pieces were re-fried for about a minute to get that crispy, golden-brown color back.

You probably already know where I’m going with this… more bullet-points:

• Squid should be prepared and cooked fresh.
• “Sweet chili sauce” is not sweet, it’s not made with chili, and it’s not sauce.
• You never re-fry squid.

It takes strong jaws (which I don’t have), good teeth (which I don’t have), and a lot of patience (which I don’t have) to get around the… technicalities, of eating squid that tastes like crap.  I’m sure that the good people of Mandarin Express have great food, but this has got to be one of the more ridiculous squid dishes I’ve ever had.  It can be summed up with (you guessed it) three bullet-points:

• Insipid (no salt here).
• Very chewy (refried squid, what do you expect).
• Inconsistent in texture (a cross between tofu and “Kapal-Gooms” tires by BF Goodrich).

Mediocre?  No, it’s well done, albeit a little too much.  At first I was kind of surprised at how, despite being overdone, the squid was still passably tender enough to cut with the side of a spoon.  Yet tenderness can be decieving; I swear I could have been chewing it all night if I had to.  Thanks to an ability to swallow a lot of things non-sexual (pride, words, the occasional piece of overcooked squid, among other things), I managed to choke down the squid.  But not without the terrific, manly broth that came with the order.

I’m sticking with the three peso-a-piece street snackage at Philcoa after this one.  Or green rice at Pao Tsin.

Forty-eight hour weeks of writing web content does two things to me: it tires me out, and it makes me hungry.  I reserve Sunday nights for good eats, where I go around the metropolis looking for good food (counting out places like Dusit Thani and the swanky places in and around Greenbelt).  Tired and famished from a lunch out at Tokyo Tokyo Glorietta with my brother, I decided to head on over KNL for dinner.

I usually make a beeline for the carinderia-style eateries that serve all iterations of adobo (chicken, pork, chicken-pork, adobong sitaw, adobong kangkong, and so on and so forth), but I had plenty of time to explore.  After a few minutes, I settled for a quiet, unassuming little nook called Carinderia Sefali, just right by the main road of Krus na Ligas.

For a place that calls itself an eatery, Carinderia Sefali was a very sophisticated place to eat.  The ethnic decorations and the handsome wood paneling reminded me of La Azotea in my hometown of Baguio City, particularly Miss Virginia de Guia’s office at the second floor.  The place was rather sparse, and as I looked up the menu boards, I got the message.  The place was a rather pricey tapsilugan, with the lowest-priced meal at a flat P60, sans soft drinks.

Not wanting to hurt my wallet, but still meaning to eat anyway, I decided to go for the reasonably-priced Garlic Squid Rice Topping, which cost P63.  For anyone who knows how expensive squid can get (Italianni’s, anyone?), P63 is a very good bargain.  (And yes, I take horrible pictures.)  The order didn’t come with a free soft drink, which was a bit of a letdown considering the price.

It took me exactly 20 minutes to get served, which was a very important cue; here’s a 20 minute window to prepare and cook seafood, especially something as delicate as squid.  Undercooked squid isn’t very appealing (and can potentially harbor salmonella), and overcooked squid can force you to chew all day.  I was rather impressed with the impeccable timing of Carinderia Sefali, which serves every dish in 20 minutes.

When I got my order, I was rather intrigued; I was expecting squid rings swathed in bits of fried or roasted garlic, but I got squid rings with green chili peppers, although the thick brown sauce that topped the cup of rice had the unmistakable aroma of garlic.  It seemed to me that Carinderia Sefali was intent on justifying the rather ridiculous sum charged for something sold as “rice toppings.”

Like I said earlier, I’m not a gourmand or a food lover; I just happen to be a lazybones writer with the most rudimentary knowledge of good food.  I must say, though, that the pricey Garlic Squid on Rice was one of the better meals I had.  The chili peppers were not spicy, but they gave the dish the right amount of zingy heat to accompany the perfectly cooked squid.

The rice was another matter, since it wasn’t exceptional; I think all P63 worth of this dish went to the viand, and you might as well consider the rice free.

I have ranted about the price of this meal for quite a few paragraphs now, so I suppose the question is, “Is the meal worth it?”  Definitely yes, and considering the price of squid, I think that this is one of the better bargains you can get at a pricey place like Carinderia Sefali.

Three stars out of five.

Me and an officemate decided to break out of this canteen-food lunch rut and headed out to a restaurant called “Foodash” at San Miguel Avenue, just a few stalls behind Rufo’s Famous Tapa (which Bachelor Food Blogger Manolo Quezon already wrote about before). For a 15-minute wait, I had something called “Crispy Lemon Chicken,” which cost around P85. For that kind of money, it must be good; after all, I may have the least sophisticated palate among the Bachelor Food Bloggers.

Yes, it looked so odd that I had to take a picture of it. “Odd,” as you may expect, is a nice way to put it.

I always expected “crispy lemon chicken” to be a crispy piece of chicken in lemon-infused Béchamel sauce, cream sauce, or just plain old lemon juice. This was different; the clear sauce almost looked – and yes, tasted like – molten lemon-flavored Maxx candy. I would have paid P85 just for the chicken, which was half-decent and perfectly palatable with a bit of soy sauce.

You could only imagine the cook before lunch hour melting candies on a skillet, I can tell you that. The sauce does kind of turn you off at first, since it reminds you of… hmmm, how should I put this… crystallized cat urine. (I haven’t seen crystallized cat urine before, but I’m sure it would look like that.)

Plus points: the crispy chicken fillets are excellent… although I have the feeling they were already pre-made. The water was also very refreshing. The serving of rice is very generous, compared to the few spoonfuls you get at the adjacent Rufo’s.

I’m all for restaurants that push the borders when it comes to cuisine, but this took the cake for me. Nothing against Foodash – which serves great Garlic Chicken – but this crispy fillet of chicken breast drenched in the syrup rendered from what looks and tastes like lemon-flavored candy is pushing the borders a bit too far. I won’t be surprised if some enterprising restaurant decides to make a chicken dish with a mint sauce made from Mentos.

Then again, Sam-I-Am and green-eggs-and-ham do have to apply – to a certain extent – to this monstrosity of a lunch that costs a little under P100. Surprisingly, once you get over the fact that you’re eating something drowned in melted candy, it does taste quite good. Well, like I said, I may have the least sophisticated palate among the Bachelor Foodistas.

But even I, a culinary alcoholic plebeian, know that Crispy Lemon Chicken sucks. Stick with Foodash’s Garlic Chicken.

• Stuff from McDonald’s;
• Intriguing stuff passed off as dim sum at the a’la carte “flea market” behind St. Francis Square;
• Ingestables from the office pantry;
• Whatever I fancy at a Happy Balls or Waffle Time at an MRT station;
• Cigarettes (yes, it’s food if it fills your stomach).

I can pass myself off as an alcoholic. A few weeks ago during a team gathering activity at Metrowalk (read: drinking session), I ended up making “absinthe” out of a cold glass of San Miguel Super Dry and a blue Vodka Cruiser. Tasted pretty damn good. Add to that a dozen more bottles of beer and some hard cocktails, and you have a recipe for disaster. Drunk? Like heck I was: I actually asked the taxi driver to stop somewhere near Vasra on my way home just so that I could vomit.

Shows you what kind of a “food blogger” - and a person - I am.

When you need to get work done, there’s always caffeine. I’m a Baguio boy, so I should be extremely familiar with hot coffee. The only problem is that when you live in a place as hot as Manila, you want everything with ice in it. So I ended up making the old reliable Wake-Up Juice back in the days of my thesis. It’s so easy to make, too:

• A can of Coke. Regular, not Light, not Coke Zero, and definitely not Pepsi.
• A pack of C4 Energy Powder Drink. Twice the caffeine. Tastes like cola.

Procedure: mix together in a glass or tumbler. Quaff.

Any general-practice physician, gastroenterologist, or psychiatrist will tell you that this is 330 milliliters and four grams of caffeinated, carbonated suicide. Which is the whole point.

Corporate emo at its finest.