Dong Won Garden, Jupiter Street, Makati

On the street where i live (for a while only )

I haven't posted a food post from Manila for a looooooong time.... I cook more now than eat out, as it saves a lot of money + it is not as oily as the outside food. Perks of having a kitchen i guess. The not so good perks, the washing up.  I remember one or two times the food was so oily, i can skip the meals for the rest of the day.  However, after being here for so long, there are some good places to eat if you want to eat out.

Since moving to the suburb of Bel-Air ( cheh.... sound like Hollywood only.... The pinoys love American sounding places ), my apartment is quite near a little Korean neighborhood. Actually, it is right in the heart of the red light district, this little Korean town. There is surprisingly a large population of Koreans in Manila because (again, surprisingly) they want to learn English here or do business here. Every weekend the malls are crawling with young korean kids here. With such a large population, of course Korean restaurants and supermarkets will sprout like mushrooms.

My house mate and i like this one korean restaurant ( we have not tried others yet except Kaya ) near our place called Dong Won, about 5-10 minutes walk across a few traffic lights. The interior of this place looks like ... a north korea throw back ( lol!) and it is run and manned mostly by Filipinos. But the food is pretty authentic as it attracts a lot of expatriates like us and Koreans, so there must be some Korean boss at the back end. A sign of good foreign food is the people of their own country flock to this place ( If not, avoid at all costs )

Typical Korean food involves alot of banchan and Dong Won (sounds like Don't Want ) serves up about 10 varieties. Unfortunately i only took a few pics as we were super hungry, there was not much times for pics.

The kim chi is pretty good, while being a tad salty and sour, it goes well with plain white rice. Kimichi is my favorite food to eat during colds. Some how or rather it makes you feel a whole lot better. The one on the left which is some fish cake is quite delicious, other colleague and i tot this was quite nice initially thinking it was sausage. And if you run out your favorites, just ask for more.

Another type of ban chan, of pork pancakes, kimchi pancake and onion pancakes. I like the pork and the onion one best. The kimchi one was a bit soft. The other banchan behind was a simple dish of spring onions. english cabbage and onions drizzled with Soy sauce. I think the first time we tried this, everyone loved it. We were so green deprived that any form of veggie that does not resemble kangkong we were happy.

No korean food is korean food without grilled meat and smelly clothes.  I think this was the pork or was it the beef. Can't remember. Okay one thing the restaurant could do with better is a good ventilation system, cause once they start the BBQ the whole place choked up. There was this mynah bird there who was squeaking away while we bbQed. Plus we didn't smell that great either after that :P. The meat was not bad, quite nice and i think by far the best thing i have eaten in my 6 months stay in Manila.

Typical asians like us needed rice. By the way, there was no free rice with the BBQ here, it comes only when you order soups. So we took a Bibimbap but i was kinda surprise to see prawns in my Bibimbap. It was okay in my books, i think Daorae's version is much better and with more kick.

So, you think it will be pretty expensive to eat korean food in Manila. Well actually no. The meat dishes were only about 399 pesos and all in all we paid about 1500 ( or less ) for the whole meal(there was four of us ). Note there were other dishes that did not make this picture show. Free smells thrown in. By the way, skip the Mackerel soup.  That was really not to great though. There are some hits and misses in this place but overall once you know what's good just continue ordering that.

If you are ever in this part of the world you can drop by to this restaurant:
Dong Won Garden
Jupiter St. (near cor. Makati Ave.)
Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines