mains

Lunch and dinner options are more or less interchangeable, in my experience, depending on when you want to eat your big meal of the day. Food is mostly meat, mostly stewlike or grilled, often sweet, and always with rice. I wasn't so crazy on it at first, but have gotten used to it and even developed some favourites.

Fresh lumpia ubod, for example, are large non-deep-fried spring rolls stuffed with palm hearts, usually served with a burnt-sugar-syrupy sauce, and are quite a crunchy and refreshing change from the stews. Once I discovered the hidden vegetable dishes of Filipino cooking, I started ordering spinachlike kankong, usually sauteed in garlic, as well as pinakbet -- a kind of vegetable stew, which in Naga usually meant mostly okra and ampalaya (a bitter melon).

On the meat side of things, fried and deep-fried rule the day (with grilling as a runner-up), and pork is king. Notable is barbecued pork with the skin (rind?) grilled crispy hard, then cut up into chunks which are one- to three-quarters fat. Maybe it's an acquired taste. Grilled tuna tail is surprisingly tasty though.

The Bicol region, where Naga City is, is famous for certain foods, notable Bicol expres, which is shredded pork with lots of chilies, cooked in coconut milk -- these last two ingredients are hallmarks of Bicolano cooking. Laing, a bitter leafy vegetable like kale or chard and cooked in (of course) coconut milk, is I think a Bicol specialty, and one of my vegetable mainstays.