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Pepper Lunch Manila Franchise

My parents and I have heard a lot about Pepper Lunch at the Power Plant Mall, which opened about a month ago, and they’ve been really curious about trying it out. I wasn’t too hot about the idea. In the first place, I’m not really one to eat out and spend money on food. But what had me rather skeptical about Pepper Lunch in particular is the over-hyped way people have been talking about it. Obviously, Pepper Lunch is the hippest, coolest restaurant these days and something tells me that people go there not so much to eat as to be seen eating. But that’s just an impression I got.

I’d have never suggested eating at Pepper Lunch last weekend, but since it was my mom’s birthday and she was curious about the place, I went along with the plan. It’s not as if I were paying for my food anyway.

The bill for four meals amounted to 1,472.00 but since my sister and I wanted dessert, the total reached 1,502 pesos. I’ve heard that the meals in Pepper Lunch aren’t exactly easy on the pocket (average cost of about 300 pesos) but I gave the place the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they’ve got really orgasmic food, and 300 bucks doesn’t quite cover how orgasmic it really is.

Salmon and Chicken with Coke Light at 312.00 pesos

Curry Beef Pepper Rice with Coke Zero at 255.00 pesos (This was what I got.)

Salmon Pepper Rice with Coke Light at 312 pesos

Steak and Hamburger with Sprite at 355 pesos

Garlic Soy Sauce and Honey Brown Sauce

The gimmick behind Pepper Lunch, besides serving supposedly really great beef from Australia, is that you get to grill your own food on your grill plate. Kind of says a lot about how lazy we can get when cooking your own food becomes a restaurant novelty. The garlic soy sauce and honey brown sauce is supposed to season your meat as you cook it.

When we got our plates, I found out that Pepper Lunch wasn’t so much about “grilling DIY” as “poking at your food with your chopsticks/spoon and fork so that you can pretend that you’re cooking and feel awesome, but really the grill plate was just a rounder, fancier version of sizzling plates we use for sisig and other sizzling dishes. And sometimes, the food was already fairly cooked that you don’t even need to do any poking around with your utensils. You just kind of have to wait for the plate to stop sizzling before you dig in.”

The curry beef pepper rice was okay. Not like, “I stood in line for half an hour just to eat this dish and it wasn’t quite what I expected” okay. It’s more like, “I’ve had better beef curry before but this isn’t so bad” okay. The beef strips were too few and too thin and instead of curry sauce, there was curry powder sprinkled on top of my rice. The garlic soy sauce was excellent though; it’s probably the best thing that Pepper Lunch has.

Molten Milk Chocolate at 120 pesos

Kuromitsu Ice Cream at 30 pesos

Dessert was a combination of Molten Milk Chocolate and Kuromitsu soft ice cream, which you can tell the lady at the counter to serve to you once you’re done eating. My sister and I discovered that the cake and the ice cream make a heavenly combination.

We arrived at Pepper Lunch at around 6 pm because my mom had to be somewhere early that evening, and the line was already this insane an hour later. And you know what? I don’t get it. I really tried, but I don’t get the hype behind Pepper Lunch at all. I don’t get why people stand in line for so long to order expensive, food-court-quality food and sit on food-court-quality tables when you can just go to a real, non-pretentious food court and get a more satisfying meal for a quarter of the price.

This brings me back to my initial assumption: Pepper Lunch is like the Starbucks of steakhouses. You go there to be seen eating, or to talk about the indescribably delicious meal you just had - while asking your friends to sniff your hair as proof that you were really there. (I hate it when I leave a restaurant smelling like the food I just ate.) I find it a little difficult to believe that people actually go there to eat because I don’t have the biggest appetite in the world, and yet my beef curry rice made me barely full. Or maybe Pepper Lunch is like Gonuts Donuts when it was still new. The idea of “cooking” your own food on your table sounds quaint enough to deserve its ridiculous price tag. But give it six months, and I bet there wouldn’t be a person standing in line during dinnertime.

Where is Pepper Lunch in Manila?
Pepper Lunch, Philippines
Rockwell Powerplant Mall, Food Court Level
Across Rustan’s Supermarket