May birthday 2019 at Locavore

by Penny Angeles-Tan | May 26, 2019 | Yummy Reviews

We love to eat. On my in-law’s side we find every occasion to meet up and just eat.  When it comes to places to eat we like to try new places that are not too expensive and are reputed to serve delicious food.

For my mother-in-law’s birthday (May 25), Erika (my daughter) and I searched online and decided to try out Locavore.  As half the family is from the south and half from the north we opted to try out the branch at BGC.

Appetizers

While waiting for the others to arrive we ordered the Street Food Platter, the Singkamas, Mangga, at Bagoong, and the Pulutang Lamang Dagat.  Unfortunately, no pictures of these as we were so hungry we just dived into them. 😀  Taste-wise there was no surprises here but the presentation was beautiful.

The street food platter had squid balls, fish balls, kikiam, and kwek kwek and there were 3 dipping sauces to choose from – manong’s sauce (which is the standard sauce made by tusok tusok vendors), sweet chili sauce, and honey vinaigrette sauce.

The singkamas, mangga’t bagoong had three slices of green mango, 5 slices of singkamas and three dipping sauces to choose from – bagoong alamang, and two others I can’t recall.

Main dishes

There were so many things we wanted to try and with 12 people in the group it was easy to order anything we wanted and just pass the dish down the table.  But we did exercise some restraint and ordered the following with a couple of platters of rice:

Gising gising

I knew that everyone was going to order a meat dish so the first order I placed was gising gising (sigadillas, french beans, shallots, and garlic) cooked in gata.  The flavor just exploded in my mouth!  The vegetables were crunchy and the sauce was just delicious!  I am sure to order this again.

Oyster sisig and sizzling sinigang

While technically an appetizer we ordered the oyster sisig as a viand along with one of their best sellers, sizzling sinigang.  The sizzling sinigang is Locavore’s reinvention of the Filipino staple sinigang.  Instead of a tamarind based soup, they made a tamarind gravy instead.

The oyster sisig may take some getting used to for some as oysters (as you know) are slimy, but it was really good!

The sizzling sinigang, however, deserves all the praise it has been getting online.  Muy delicioso to the last drop of sauce and to the last bite!

Beef Pares Stew (sorry for the blurry pic)

We know what beef pares tastes like but we wanted to taste what their take on this Filipino breakfast dish was going to be like.

We also ordered the Mac’s Boneless Fried Chicken but again, like before, we were too hungry to take a photo of it. 😀  Personally, I didn’t like it.  I found it too salty but they seemed ok with it so maybe it was just me.

Dessert

Turon con Leche

At first, Erika was iffy about trying this because she isn’t a fan of banana but when I read the ingredients out to her and she discovered there was no banana she decided to go ahead and order this.  Have you ever tasted a Portuguese Egg Tart?  That’s basically what it tastes like.  It is flaky and filled with custard and flan.  Yum!

Torta Mangga

So many restaurants have their own version of this delicious dessert.  Think of it as a sans rival with sliced mangoes on top.  It is difficult to go wrong with ripe mangoes 😀

Other food orders

Champorado ni Speedy

We ordered Champorado ni Speedy because we were curious about how champorado would taste with cream cheese in it.  Champorado is comfort food so we were curious how they could make it different and their own.

I personally loved this one.  Chocolate rice pudding topped with powdered milk with a dollop of cream cheese and both evaporated and condensed milk served on the side.  After mixing it up we all got a serving of this and I opted to take it without the additional milk.  Perfect!  I prefer the slightly bitter taste of dark chocolate so this suited me to a tee.  I admit I went back for seconds. 😀

We also ordered Duck Lugaw (also no picture) which was lugaw with foie gras.  As this arrived late I didn’t even get to taste it anymore but I am assuming that it tasted good.

All in all, we loved Locavore!  While the price of the food items is a bit on the high side, it makes up for it in taste.  Twelve people ate, all that food less senior and PWD discount and our total bill were a little over 6k.  That isn’t too bad for a birthday dinner.

Locavore has more than just the BGC branch.  If I am correct there is also one in Makati and another in Kapitolyo, Pasig.  Find the one nearest you and try it out for yourself.