The Best Places to Eat in Central Illinois | Eater Chicago

"Chef-owner Abella Miller chocks up her success to the fact that she’s the only chef in the area serving up her style of Filipino comfort food. When she opened her current location in 2021, her mission was simply to feed the small but hungry (and, most of all, homesick) Filipino community in and around the greater Decatur area. However, her rousing, wholesome takes on Filipino staples — including pancit, smokey and generously portioned to-go, and chicken adobo, the national dish of the Philippines — have, over time, proven to have wide popularity, and they quickly sell out each day. She cooks everything herself from a small food stall in the back of an Asian sundries market, which itself is tucked into a patch of strip mall that shares a parking lot with, of all things, a Walmart on the city’s north side, only part of the appeal. But really it’s the gift that Miller’s food offers to Decatur — a town so stereotypically Midwestern that the heretofore height of Asian cuisine has been a Panda Express that doubles down by having an actual drive-thru — in that she sometimes offers dishes rarely seen outside of Southeast Asia, such as pinakbet, a hearty meat and vegetable dish flavored with fermented shrimp paste. For a town known as the Soybean Capital of the World, it’s a great lesson to show that there are more ways than one to achieve umami." - Timothy DePeugh