The flavors and spices of Asia: Tonyboy Cojuangco and Ariel Manuel reunite with Phat Wong, an Asian comfort food café on Reposo

MANILA, Philippines - Chef Ariel Manuel set the bar for fine dining in Manila with his much-celebrated Lolo Dad’s, and with a moneyed foodie like Tonyboy Cojuangco backing his projects, the two appeared invincible. Not true.

The elegance and sheer experience of dining at Lolo Dad’s raised too many expectations from its spin-offs, La Regalade on Pasay Road (or Arnaiz Avenue) and Lolo Dad’s Brasserie at the 6750 building on Ayala Avenue, even though both were excellent restaurants on good days.

Now the tandem is in collaboration once again, this time coming much closer to home with a relaxed Asian café that fuses Filipino favorites with dishes from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Korea, and Vietnam. The buzz surrounding its opening was again precariously strong and sent expectations — including my own — through the rafters, but if you remember to keep in mind that Manuel, Cojuangco, and Phat Wong’s chief operating chef, Lolo Dad’s alumni Marge Villena, never intended to transcend Asian cuisine the way Lolo Dad’s transcended cuisine in general, you will appreciate Phat Wong for what it was meant to be: a casual Asian restaurant o

Interesting appetizer: Golden-brown and delicious heart-shaped blue crab, crab fat, and lemongrass dumplings on sticks.

ffering familiar flavors in style. 

That style greets you the moment you walk into the place that used to be the old Ricco Renzo art house café at the LRI Design Plaza on Reposo (or is it Nicanor Garcia? We Filipinos have a weird tendency to change street names in our sleep). A cozy lounge foyer with oversized olive-toned reading chairs introduces you to a simple square space with a distinctly exotic mood established by lots of dark bamboo and wooden Venetian blinds. There is wood everywhere, and the walls are adorned with interesting pieces of abstract art that ricochet glances off to the oriental lanterns hanging from the ceiling. We’re sitting on rattan chairs, of course, and if I didn’t see any slow-rotating ceiling fans, they would have no problem fitting right in.

What can I compare this place to? I barely recall my first Good Earth experience, but it’s the first restaurant that came to mind when I popped the preceding question. A more imaginative pan-Asian Via Mare? When I think of restaurants in the Bay Area, which I often do when I write about restaurants here, I think of Betelnut on Union Street.  

At Phat Wong a cozy lounge foyer with oversized olive-toned reading chairs introduces you to a simple square space with a distinctly exotic mood established by lots of dark bamboo and wooden Venetian blinds. Phat Wong Asian Café is on the ground floor, LRI Plaza, 210 Nicanor Garcia, Bel Air II

The service was faster than chained lightning, which pleased the hell out of me, so when the shrimp and pomelo salad was brought out I couldn’t help regarding it as an ideal way to begin the dinner, because it set the tone with a good visual and aromatic first impression — the cool, fresh, and savory salad came to our table cocooned in a de-shelled young coconut. At first I thought I was looking at a big snowball of buffalo mozzarella with a crown of shrimp and greens until I broke the white orb with my fork, discovered it was not cheese, and tasted the tropical sweetness of buko enhanced by a dressing made from its milk perked up with some zesty squeezes of lime. Then, of course, the plump little grilled shrimp provided the meaty bites required to complete this dish as a fun and flavorful first course.

An interesting appetizer for our menu that night was a plate of golden brown and delicious heart-shaped blue crab, crab fat, and lemongrass dumplings on sticks. Its appearance was charming in a county fair kind of way; they looked like chicken nuggets on lollipop sticks but tasted like sophisticated bite-sized crab cakes, crunchy on the outside, mushy on the inside — the kind of thing you could munch on continuously for an indefinite period of time. And you can’t put an appetizer on a stick without giving it something to dip into, so an appropriate sauce of Asian mayo, roasted garlic, and chili is served to dress the dumplings up nicely.

In the delicious tradition of the Cantonese lhang-poon or cold dish, a platter of quartered century eggs was served with duck breast asado and a wasabi-strength mustard that opens your eyes and forces you to become aware of how perfectly this condiment complements its meat. I’ve had some nasty century eggs that tasted like horse piss in my day, but this was a clean, simple, yet exciting dish. Its chopstick-pace consumption speed pushed all the right appetite receptors, like all Chinese-banquet first courses should.  

The size of each dish grew in succession. Out came a plate of five-spice crispy pigeon, delectable deep-fried little birds that greeted your tongue with the spicy sweetness of cinnamon and fennel before you gnawed on the spare tender flesh that clung to its tiny bones. They were smaller and leaner than I expected, but perfectly fried out of any hint of off-putting gaminess. It came with a sweet chili sauce that took a few moments for me to identify the exotic flavor of plums; the sauce enhanced the bone-licking tastiness of the pigeon, particularly its head, which was an unevenly crunchy morsel of saltiness that I popped into my mouth and decomposed with pleasure.

Five-spice crispy pigeon: Delectable deep-fried little birds that greeted your tongue with the spicy sweetness of cinnamon and fennel.

The next dish was probably my least favorite, only because the delicately deep-fried squares of salt-and-pepper squid actually looked like chicken McNuggets, only faker. The squid was cooked perfectly, and it was accompanied by an always-welcome hoisin sauce, but it had a peculiarly bitter aftertaste that mystified more than offended.

What is probably the most attractive and recommended item on the menu is the US Angus rib-eye bistek tagalog. Only a fool would be ignorant of its self-explanatory deliciousness: the soft, marbled quality of the beef marinated in a jus that we’ve all been raised to love, then cooked to tender perfection with onion rings and served with a sticky hill of steaming white rice — I mean, how could you possibly roll into the gutter with this one? It was quite simply very high-quality and lovingly prepared Filipino comfort food; a juicy steak that refuses to fall into the trap of over-acidity and instead playfully tickles the soul with that flavorful and familiar balance of soy sauce and sweetness. 

Relaxed Asian café: Phat Wong fuses Filipino favorites with dishes from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Korea, and Vietnam.

While the bistek is a popular Pinoy no-brainer, their signature dish is the Hainanese chicken: birds flown in from Hong Kong on a daily basis and boiled to a succulent and oily yellow flesh in a spiced master stock. This is a simple dish that depends almost entirely on the quality of the chicken, and this one was so soft and tender it almost felt raw; but it was perfectly poached to render the meat juicy and ready to sponge up the accompanying chili, ginger, garlic, and soy sauces.  

So the house specialties passed with high marks, but my personal favorite, however, was only served as an entrée on a special-occasion menu. The Braised Pork Knuckles with Deep Fried Buns is essentially an excellently prepared pata tim served with fried golden-brown siopao. Like a paksiw, the pata tim braise, with its cloves, sangke, and root beer, runs the risk of tasting diabetically sweet, but this one was perfectly balanced, complex and intriguing. The buns were somewhat of a revelation as I’m always looking for new sauce mops, and to find one in Asian cuisine — where rice is the preferred starch for cleaning up plates — was enlightening. Particularly since I was never a big patron of siopao to begin with, until some hungry fool decided to toss one into a deep-fryer and turn them into beautiful brown buns with a crunchy, toasted texture and flavor that was warm, chewy, and almost pastry-like on the inside — a perfect tool for soaking up the sauce.

During these final stages of our dinner, as our table became more textured and colorful with dishes of varying size and shape, it occurred to me that our evening had been filled with spice — a positive notion in my mind. There was a poached white fillet dish that was mildly neglected only because it tricked the mind into looking uninteresting, but then tricked it again by tasting just the opposite. More reassuring soy and ginger absorbed by the light and fluffy, fresh-tasting white meat of the fish that literally disappeared in your mouth in the space of a second.

Fun and flavorful first course: Sweet buko enhanced by a dressing made from its milk and lime. The plump little grilled shrimp complete the dish.

From a macro view, the menu we had just enjoyed was an experience worth recommending, and the parade of prominent flavors was delightfully capped off and mellowed by two very good desserts. Their special halo-halo could be called a dessert soup featuring a fiesta of colorful ingredients that tasted like they looked. As every halo-halo should be, it was very cold and very refreshing, with a touch of lemongrass to link this Filipino desert with its

Native fruit baked meringue with mango, banana pandan cream, and crunchy caramel

Southeast Asian neighbors.

That and a native fruit baked meringue with mango, banana pandan cream, and crunchy caramel — where the pandan stood out and blended in at the same time, like a perfect party guest — were served and enjoyed as a happy Broadway ending to a dinner loaded with exciting Asian flavors and spices. This is not Lolo Dad’s on a rickshaw and it never intended to be, but it is a welcome new effort by a dedicated team and its ultimate success as a restaurant will depend on how long they can keep diners like me as happy as freshwater clams. 

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Phat Wong Asian Café is on the ground floor, LRI Plaza, 210 Nicanor Garcia, Bel Air II. It is open daily from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. For more information, call 555-1346 or 298-3573.