"You want something to eat?" he asked, rising from his seat and reaching for the plates stacked on a table opposite the one with the remotes. "The buffet's right there." He pointed to the steam table at the far end of Filipino Cuisine, a restaurant in an aging Irving strip mall. "Somethin' to drink?" He grabbed some coffee-colored tumblers and headed for a large white plastic cooler propped atop a chair in front of a refrigerated case holding canned soft drinks. The cooler was filled with crushed ice.
"Go ahead and sample the buffet," he urged, dropping off the glasses of iced tea. I sipped it, perusing a copy of the menu printed on bright green paper. And it got me a little nervous. It listed things like flat noodles with ground pork skin, beef tripe with rice, and fried pork stomach. But I swallowed my nerves and dug into the buffet anyway ($5.95 a person at lunch, $6.95 evenings and weekends). All of the food looked fresh. This is different from most buffet tables, which are bits of food with drying edges sitting in sauces with thickening films.
There was ginataan, a pleasing concoction of whole shrimp, sweet potato chunks, green beans, and red chilies in curried coconut milk. There were chunks of seasoned, roasted pork with a thick layer of outer fat cooked into a crispy, fibrous crust that leaked when pressed. Another buffet pan held chicken and pork adobo, a tasty mingling of moist chicken-thigh fragments and bits of pork with peppers and whole peppercorns in a sauce drafted from vinegar and soy sauce.
Still another pan was filled with slices of beef knotted with onions. This was different: the meat was hard and overcooked -- almost like beef jerky. Steamed rice slipped too, paddled onto the plate in dry, brittle wads.
At the end of the buffet table sat a metal bin filled with loosely constructed rolls called lunpiang sariwa. They resembled burritos. Enveloped in an opaque rice-egg crepe, the rolls were stuffed with turnip, cabbage, chickpeas, green beans, and fresh lettuce in a sweet sauce. A similar sauce was ladled over the top. The rolls were light and delicious.
Like American food, Filipino cuisine is a mongrel. For hundreds of years, the Philippine Islands were infiltrated by foreign traders -- Malaysians, Indonesians, Arabians, Indians, Chinese, and Spanish -- who deposited spices and culinary influences.
Chinese-inspired creations include fried lumpia and pancit. A creation similar to egg rolls, fried lumpia ($5) are thin and tightly packed. They're filled with ground beef, garlic, onions, chestnuts, and other vegetables and are crisp and mild, yet cleanly flavorful.
Pancit bihon ($6.95), a dish anchored on thin rice noodles, is a conglomeration of shrimp, cabbage, chicken or pork, and sausage -- at least according to the menu. But ours had no shrimp. There was no sausage either. What there was were little rubbery slices of a yellow substance that tasted like fish and bits of gristly pork. It also contained peapods that were slightly faded, though the carrot, onion, and cabbage were perfectly prepared -- overall, a satisfying dish.
I was summarily lassoed into the last dish I sampled at Filipino Cuisine. It was while paying the bill at the front counter, which is actually a glass case filled with merchandise for sale such as crocheted blankets, costume jewelry, shoes, and bottles of vinegar. "We sell airline tickets. Ask for details," says a sign behind the cash register. Another says something about phone cards. Near the door is a long lavender picnic table spread with plastic-bagged paper plates holding little white buns. They looked like Hostess Snowballs.
A Filipino lady asked me whether I wanted to try one. "They're rice cakes," she said. The man in the shorts called them puta. "But we don't say that around Mexicans," he said. (The word means "whore" in Spanish).
The rice cakes were puffy, sticky, and sweet with a sharp taste that made me think they might be fermented. "You like?" she asked. I nodded. She pushed a button on the cash register. Without realizing it, I had just bought a whole plate of the things. I looked over at the man in the shorts. He had the remote in his hand. He was smiling.