Filipino Flavors at Sawsaw, Rockwell Drive, Poblacion Makati City, Philippines

 The seldom times that my husband and I do get to go out, we try to squeeze in our lunch at a new restaurant. It’s a simple perk-me-up and quality time all rolled into one. 

After a much stressful morning, we knew we needed to take a bit of a break and have a somewhat slow paced lunch. We settled on a place in Makati since we didn’t want to travel away from our neighborhood.

This is Sawsaw by Chef Sau. 

On the first floor, the open kitchen let’s you see how your dishes get prepared. We were supposed to sit here but we opted to have a more quiet atmosphere upstairs. The receptionist “helpfully” pointed out our table from across the room instead of leading us to our seats. Thanks for the assist Sarah. 

We were lucky to have the whole 2nd floor to ourselves; though that meant that there were also no servers present (as evidenced by the 2 uncleared tables). It also meant that there was no one there to give us menus so hubby took the initiative to just get menus from the uncleared tables, which I then proceeded to hose down with lots of alcohol (“self service”). 

Moment of truth, if this happened at any other time, these would be enough to make us walk out already. But since our dates/eat outs happen rarely, we didn’t want this to be marred by something negative. 

Waiting it out turned out to be a good thing since it was at this point that the service turned around for the better.

#FoodStarsAtUptownMall: Cowboy Grub at Texas Roadhouse, Uptown Mall, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig City, Philippines

My feed has been filling up with alerts from the newly opened Texas Roadhouse in Uptown Mall. As luck would have it, we were invited to a birthday celebration on the week of its opening.

Due to its soft opening, phone lines were either down or no one was answering hence we were forced to go without a reservation.  Wisely used the time taking pictures while we waited to be seated.

To keep us from losing our cool ('coz they were really making us wait a long time), they began serving their complementary wares.

.... and I must say, they should've served this earlier. These freshly baked bread rolls with cinnamon butter is enough to cool off any hot heads in sight. I couldn't stop raving about this and our dinner was yet to start.  Food-Stars Tip: Ask for a butter knife for spreading the butter since they don't serve it with one. Here's a little incident that happened to us. One of the managers who apparently didn't want to go back to the kitchen & get one told us to use the ones on the table instead. When we unwrapped the napkins, the knife he was talking about was bigger than the rolls 'coz it was a steak knife. I would've understood if that was the same case for everyone but our other table got a butter knife. Tsk tsk. Tamad 101. I just asked for one from a server instead. 

S-S-P-P at Chef d' Angelo, Glorietta 5

In the mood for an all-you-can-eat tummy adventure, we decided to head to our newly discovered food spot in Glorietta 5. 

Word to the wise: Best to get there early to avoid the dinner rush.

Promo

Chef d' Angelo, Glorietta 5

Theirs is a casual dining restaurant. It's a pay before you eat kind of thing. We head to the cashier and placed our order. For the eat-all-you-can buffet, we were each given a yellow paper bracelet for identification. We also availed their bottomless iced tea (just add 50 pesos).


CAUTION: Don't expect the same treatment with the high-class buffets. Here, everything is self service. And the staff are inattentive, slow and unhelpful. 


The buffet is laid on a long table and divided into 4 parts: 
Soup, Salad, Pizza & Pasta (S-S-P-P).