On this episode of Carinderia Crawl we visit Pot-ling Cuisine in Marikina City for Filipino comfort food — which is exactly what this episode’s 24-year-old host, Jasmine Santos, needed after braving Edsa’s soul-sucking traffic. She works as a media planner and usually stays in her Makati office till 10pm to avoid the traffic mess, but tonight she ventured out at 5pm so she could meet the Coconuts TV crew in Parang, Marikina and show us around her ‘hood. Her usual trip involves only one van, but she ended up taking a different route and riding a tricycle just to reach us in time. It’s more fun in the Philippines!
Pot-Ling is a cozy and colorful carinderia, with banana yellow and coconut green walls, as well as plastic grapes and tomatoes dangling outside the glass cabinet where the owners display the day’s selection of cooked dishes. There is also a table overflowing with fruits like papaya, pineapple, bananas, and watermelon that will really put you in the mood for eating.
Jasmine starts with stir-fried ground beef with green peas, carrots, potatoes and tomato sauce which she could not help but compare with how they prepare it at home (her parents use bigger and juicier chunks of meat) and follows that with kare-kare because she’s crazy about tripe and likes the challenge of slicing it into tiny pieces. There were praises all around for the peanut-based gravy which she swears was a meal unto itself with rice. Yay!
Her last dish was a noodle dish called pancit luglug (which Marikina is famous for) with shrimps, hardboiled eggs, fish sauce and pork cracklings on top. Jasmine quickly compliments the thick, rich gravy and calls the combination of textures “a bite of heaven”.
Good thing paradise doesn’t cost a lot. For those three dishes, a pitcher of water and extra soup, the bill came up to PHP120. Proof that a food trip to Marikina — whether to eat at Pot-ling, Tapsi Ni Vivian, Krung Thai or Rustic Mornings by Isabelo — will always be always worth it.
Pot-ling Cuisine (32 ML Quezon St, Parang, Marikina City; +63 2 9340513. Daily 7am-9pm.
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