Oh, Filipinos! Your cuisine is so delicious yet so maligned—“just a bunch of meat mixed with sour vegetables” said a friend once, a veteran food critic whose name I’m withholding to spare the august gent any angry letters. And your restaurants are the most inaccessible in America—usually no menu save for a couple of untranslated or unexplained specials plastered around the dive, with no time for a hostess to describe the buffet in front of you because 15 other Filipinos wait impatiently behind you. The only non-Filipinos I ever see in your eateries are inevitably related to one by marriage, friendship or job. But I don’t care—I’ve seen the light, and its name is the combo meal at Manila Grove.

Every day, cooks whip up meals and take the extraordinary step of posting that day’s menu on Manila Groove’s website. Make sure to download this menu—you’ll need it to figure out what’s what when you enter the restaurant. There are no signs, no lists, no anything other than your nose and eyes to clue you in. Don’t fret about the lack of direction: just point at whatever looks promising, and you’re bound to pick something delicious—besides, for a two-item combo setting you back about 6 bucks, anything’s delicious, no?

Last week, they offered a couple of beef dishes: ground beef coupled with veggies and floating in a thick, almost curry broth; a salty beef bone-marrow soup called bulalo; and beef mechado, a thick, hearty, tomato-based stew that can play as well in Des Moines as it does for Pinoys. Most days, any number of whole fishes (tilapia, rabbitfish, milkfish and some other smaller critters) will sit fried, grilled, baked or dried in trays. The only constants are pansit bihon (glass noodles jumbled with shrimp, celery, green onions and garlic), two scoops of white rice, crunchy lumpia and adobo, the marinated meats that are a Filipino standard, so tender here that the chunks almost trickle through the fork tines.

The only full-length menu at Manila Groove is available Saturdays, when the regulars in the restaurant’s buffet carousel are joined by six silogs—what Filipinos call an eggs-and-fried-rice breakfast. Tocilog throws in crispy bacon and tomatoes; longsilong adds plump sausages; the jepsilog includes a jeprox, surely the strangest name ever for a common fish (the sole). No matter the choice of meat, all the silogs fill you in a way Norms never can—and at $3.50 a silog, the only meals in Orange County that match up in price, taste and diversity are the samples tables at Costco.



MANILA GROOVE, 678 EL CAMINO REAL, TUSTIN, (714) 505-3905; WWW.MANILAGROOVE.COM.

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