Dana S.
Yelp
Counter-service joint for Filipino fusion food. We don't really have anything like this where I live (which is surprising to me because the concept is totally intuitive), so I was curious to try. I was a little hesitant though, because I was worried it might be the kind of food that's really oily, salty, etc, but even though they have lots of fried foods here, it was more like homestyle food than greasy fast food.
The menu has lots of customizable choices, many of which are vegan-friendly. You can even further dress your food to your liking with the variety of condiments at every table: Filipino all purpose sauce, sriracha, sweet chili sauce, sriracha ketchup, banana ketchup, and of course salt and pepper. There's a huge variety of desserts too and many flavours of bubble tea with the usual selection of standard toppings plus fruits and Filipino-inspired options.
I got the Canton style deluxe pancit noodles with tofu, ube flan, and a lychee lemon Thai tea with jackfruit. I really liked the texture of the fine lo mein noodles with the shredded vegetables. It was also appreciated that there were a LOT of vegetables, about equal parts veg and noodle. Flavour-wise, I found that the first few bites were a little plain, but I added some of the all-purpose sauce and sriracha from the condiment rack at my seat and that made it perfect. It's cool that they have such a variety of condiments at every table: salt and pepper, sriracha ketchup, banana ketchup, sweet chili sauce, and the sauces above. I could have used a more intense ube flavour from the ube flan but it was still very nice - the flan wasn't too sweet and had the characteristic earthiness of ube with a nice caramelized condensed milk topping. I really liked the unexpected (to me) combination of Thai tea and lychee in my drink, and the jackfruit would have complimented it nicely except the pieces were too long to go through my straw and sank to the bottom of the drink so I couldn't really sip them up without a straw, so I ended up just eating them with a spoon - maybe cutting them shorter would make it easier.
I kept being bothered by two small flies while I was eating. I don't know how it is in Portland, but in Vancouver where I'm from, fruit flies are unavoidable during the summer so I'll give most places a pass on flies during that season, but not in March. I think it was only two, so not an infestation, but still annoying.
The people were nice. I could not decide what I wanted to drink and changed every single aspect of my drink order as I was placing it, but the guy taking the order was very chill about it. Would return if I lived in the area.
