Angelo B.
Yelp
Now that's what I'm talking about! For the same reason I love taco trucks, street food and hole-in-the-walls, I love Baby's Eatery and Palabok.
Carinderias are low-priced eating places in the Philippines often found along roadsides or in markets. They aren't the most sanitary of eating places, but it's the closest to mom's home cooking you will ever find.
Baby's is almost like a carinderia but cleaner. They serve the food "turo-turo" style which is a kind of like buffet-esque where the dishes are laid out, you point (turo) what you want and they scoop it onto a bowl and serve it to you with a plate of steaming hot white rice.
Their menu changes from day to day. The day I went, they had dinuguan (pork blood stew), binagoongan (pork cooked in shrimp paste), pinakbet (vegetables cooked in shrimp paste) kare-kare (ox tail and tripe in peanut sauce with vegetables), menudo, skewered pork bbq, lumpiang shanghai (filipino spring rolls), sinigang na isda (fish in tamarind broth), sinigang na baboy (pork in tamarind broth), and of course, pansit palabok (filipino version of pad thai).
Suffice it to say, my friends and I went to town.
Among the 4 of us, we had 4 giant skewers of pork bbq, 2 servings of kare-kare, 1 serving of menudo, 1 serving of binagoongan, 1 serving of sinigang na baboy, 2 servings of pansit palabok, 4 orders of white rice, 2 canned cokes and a partridge in a pear tree. Our bill total: $41.00. As hungry as we were, we couldn't even finish it. Oh, and did I mention that everything was frickin delish? Filipino home cooking at its best.
The place itself is tiny. I'd say it seats a total of 10 max. not ideal for dining in, but I don't mind it at all. Some people might be turned off by the fact that all the ingredients and vegetables are laid out on one of the tables while being prepped and chopped by Baby herself. Tita Baby, as I like to call her. If you're not used to this sort of thing, order it to go.
As we were leaving the place feeling satiated and certain we had found our new SF filipino lunch spot, as if things couldn't get any better, Tita Baby flags us down and offers us a handful of hopia (mung bean rolls) on the house.
Now that's what I call a thin slice of heaven! :)
4.2 stars