Cafe Xocolat is one of my favorite coffee shops ever. It’s cozy, comfortable, and well-designed but minus the pretentious facade most coffee shops have these days in an attempt to compete with the McDonald’s of the coffee shop world. More important than the homey atmosphere it provides is the food they serve, of course, and Cafe Xocolat’s offerings are no less than sublime.
Like anyone else who appreciates the good life and good food, I was really happy to be able to experience the delectable flavors of summer with Appetite Magazine and Greenbelt’s grand launch of The Tasting Room.
I heard that The Tasting Room has a reputation for offering some of the dishes that can only be found in the world’s hottest culinary hubs, and today they gave us a chance to enjoy full course meals and more dishes at their favorite restaurants at only a fraction of their regular price. But not only did we get to try out restaurant best sellers and sampler platters - there was a specially designed menu that was unveiled in today’s grand launch.
If Bebeth Lorenzo’s face looks familiar to you, that’s because she used to be in many print ads and TV commercials before her experiences in Europe turned her into the stellar dessert baker she is today. Miss Desserts is famous for her exquisite cakes, among which is the cheesecake that was considered one of Manila’s best, according to a consumer survey. What I like about the Miss Desserts cheesecake is that it’s rich and flavorful, but it doesn’t feel heavy in your tummy the way most decadent desserts do. Not a cheesecake fan? The Fantasia is a mouthwatering pie with a chocolate crust that’s covered in caramel and topped with Belgian chocolate mousse. I love how it fixes the chocolate fix without giving you that sick, overloaded feeling afterwards. Another rich but light dessert you can find here is the Chocolate Souffle - but it’s only available when Bebeth is in town because she insists on making it herself.
The Bonifacio High Street/Serendra leg of the Spot.Ph Blogger’s Food Tour took place at 2 - 6 this afternoon, with around forty bloggers trying out the following restaurants:
Chelsea
Choco-late de Batirol
Cuillere
Cupcakes by Sonja
Kape Isla
Mamou
Mezzaluna
Miss Desserts
Polu Kai
Portico
Xocolat
Italianni’s
Krispy Kreme
Kabisera
New Olrean’s
Starbuck’s
Texas Roadhouse Grill
TGI Friday’s
Ideally we should have already been to every single restaurant by 6 pm, except we took our time eating and chatting at the first five or six establishment. At 5, we stopped going to the restaurants by groups and headed to the restaurant of choice on our own. By then, we had also been too full to properly appreciate the samples from the restaurants we tried last - which was such a shame because they had really interesting dishes prepared for us.
Watch out for individual reviews of the restaurants from the Spot.Ph Bloggers Food Tour over the next couple of days!
Divisoria is best place to get wholesale items and random cheap finds, with two big, air-conditioned malls (Divimall and 168) to make shopping more comfortable for retailers and bargain-hunters. There are food courts at the highest floor of each mall but you can also get refreshing snacks and street food from the many vendors lined up on the narrow streets right outside the malls.
Maybe it’s not the healthiest breakfast in the world, but I love the idea of having chocolate fondue first thing in the morning. I just discovered the chocolate fondue at Max Brenner’s in Greenbelt and I think I like it better than the one in the Mandarin Hotel because it comes with not just one, but two kinds of chocolate - milk chocolate and white chocolate.
I know that tea connoisseurs are probably aghast at how tea is packaged for the masses these days - in bottles, powder, and now in single-serving sachets. Maybe this is me just being a total cheapskate but I like tea in its instant, cheap, mass-produced form. I used to subsist on bottled milk tea and cookies from a nearby 7-11 when I still had a day job. Sure, mass-produced tea probably no longer has any of the health benefits that “real” tea has, and it probably doesn’t contain any real tea leaves either. But I’m not about to spend over a hundred pesos on a cup of tea. Besides, I like smothering tea in lots of milk and sugar, even the expensive kind. So the “common” tea suits me just fine.
Today I saw that we had some of the new Lipton milk tea somewhere in the house and I got to try them out for the first time. Well, I only tried out two of the three kinds we have - the Gold one and the Vanilla-flavored one. I tried out the Vanilla-flavored tea first, thinking that I would like it better than the others. While I’m a sucker for anything vanilla, I found the tea a little too sweet and the vanilla flavor a little too overpowering. I could barely taste the tea. I liked the Gold one more because it reminds me so much of the black tea I had in Bangkok and Laos; drinking it almost made me feel as though I was there.
In any case, I love how they come in convenient little sachets that you can carry around with you just in case you ever come across a styrofoam cup and hot water somewhere. Highly recommended for cheapskate, occasional-tea lovers.
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