2008 August : Tiny Bites

Filipino Restaurant Series: Cucina Manila

9 Comments Karen HamiltonAugust 31, 2008

The third establishment on my Filipino dining wishlist was Cucina Manila, a turo-turo restaurant by Joyce Station. It was highly praised by a colleague and a salsa dancing acquaintance, both of whom make their respective commutes from New Westminster and the West End to partake in its culinary offerings.

It was hyped to be much better than Sandy’s Cuisine, the restaurant that has recently trumped Josephine’s Restaurant as my Filipino restaurant of choice. Last weekend, my husband and I made the trip over to Cucina Manila to see just what was so extraordinary about this place.

Let’s start with the menudo, the pork stew that was once my favourite at Josephine’s and whose degradation I have been lamenting ever since.

While the quality was indeed better than the recipe currently being dished out at Josephine’s, it still doesn’t compare to my mom’s recipe, nor the one that I’ve secretly loved more than my mother’s by former Josephine’s chef, Mang Rene.

The other dishes we ordered were decent at best. Both of us were let down that we had travelled all this way for food that we could have made better at home. We also weren’t thrilled that there was no posted menu to speak of. It quite intimidated my husband, who felt very conscious of his lack of Filipino vocabulary and his unfamilarity with the dishes that were on display.

Hoping that our dining experience was just an off day, I took home an order of daing and kutsina to try out over the next few days.

Daing is butterflied milkfish that’s been marinated in vinegar and garlic and fried till crispy. It’s one of my favourite Filipino breakfast dishes, but cooking something this pungent at home would induce the wrath of all of our neighbours (not to mention my husband). The daing from Cucina Manila did a good job of satisfying my breakfast craving, and was probably the best tasting item out of the ones we had sampled.

The kutsinta was passable. It was by no means as good as the stuff my aunts have served us at the monthly Filipino potlucks we attend, but it was better than anything I could have made myself.

Would we come back and see if we’d like other dishes at Cucina Manila? Probably not. Perhaps I’m so used to how my family makes certain dishes that the style of cooking at Cucina Manila is simply not to my taste. Perhaps my husband’s discomfort at feeling out of place and unwelcome as a non-Filipino was an impression I’ll have a hard time overcoming. At any rate, Josephine’s and Sandy’s are much closer to our downtown abode and will likely continue to be our go-to places until I complete my tour of the other Filipino restaurants in the Lower Mainland.

Want to convince me otherwise? Leave me a comment and let’s see if I can be persuaded to try Cucina Manila once more.

Cucina Manila
5179 Joyce Street | Vancouver
(604) 435-4508

Other blog reviews of Cucina Manila:

Van Eats: First visit: Cucina Manila

Filipino Restaurant Series to date:

Categories: Collingwood, Food, Restaurants

Here’s to hoping that David Suzuki will dig my balcony garden!

2 Comments Karen HamiltonAugust 28, 2008

As I have mentioned before, we have been cultivating a garden on our balcony for the first time this summer. Here’s the submission I sent off tonight to the David Suzuki Digs My Garden photo contest, complete with ~200 word essay.

The deadline to submit a photo is on Monday, September 1st, so if you were planning on participating, you’d better get cracking!

My husband and I live in a 300-suite apartment complex in the heart of downtown Vancouver. Our place is small but we are lucky to have a sizeable balcony, which is approximately 4′ deep and 10′ wide.

Over the past few years, we’d been throwing around the idea of growing our own herbs to supply our home cooking needs. Since there was no space left at the nearby Onni community gardens, we decided to transform our balcony into an urban and culinary garden.

So off we went to Trout Lake Farmers Market on its opening day, scouting the organic basil, rosemary, thyme, and other herbs that we wanted to take home. Over the next few weeks, we amassed 9 herbs and a little Sophie’s Choice tomato plant, all of which we’ve been nurturing throughout the summer with lots of help from the Digs My Garden newsletter tips.

Thanks to this herb garden, we’ve enjoyed a number of wonderful summer meals that have been inspired by what is in abundance just outside of our living room door!

Categories: Dinner, Food, Going Green, Recipes, Urban Gardening

An evening of food and photography with a Coffee Geek

4 Comments Karen HamiltonAugust 24, 2008

Lately, I’ve been following the Twitter musings of Mark Prince, founder of CoffeeGeek.com. It’s the site that my food blogging mentor points me to in my quest to educate myself about the world of coffee.

I had the opportunity to hang with Mark at JJ Bean a few days ago, along with 2008 Western Regional Barista Competition winner Sammy Piccolo of Caffe Artigiano. As I had missed out on the regionals a couple weeks back, Sammy and Mark gave me a run-down of the event, complete with iPhone photo sharing and a showing of Sammy’s “barista hands”. It was a pleasure to talk coffee with these two and to observe their easy camaraderie as they gave me a glimpse inside the industry.

Notable take-away: are you curious about the volatile history of coffee? Check out the 2002 documentary Black Coffee, as I will soon do. [Sammy was featured in the 2006 documentary Black Gold, which I will also check out in the near future.]

As our coffee meetup drew to a close and Sammy took his leave, Mark and I moved over to a nearby El Salvadorean restaurant for an early dinner. Topics shifted to food, restaurants, wine, and photography as we delighted in tacos with homemade chorizo and a selection of pupusas.