In the spirit of Dinagyang, that concluded over the weekend, here’s a reprise of something I wrote a while back on Iloilo’s signature dish.
Some sophisticates might harrumph, “There’s got to be more to Iloilo than batchoy.”
I mean I love Popoy’s, but I guess part of the reason is because it is in the innards of the Iloilo public market. To get there, you have to pass through the dried fish section and you have all the smell of dried squid and guinamos opening up your senses even before you even get a whiff of batchoy. Not fair, because I had Deco’s only 15 minutes after Popoy’s when I was already full, those 15 minutes I spent traveling from Central Market to La Paz with a stop at the post-World War II bakery Pan de Buho to try the famous pantso, Iloilo’s custardy version of pan de coco, which was also quite an adventure because to buy it we had to negotiate a narrow alley on Mapa Street and through a hole only twice the size of my face on the nondescript hollow block wall, literally a hole in the...
The very next day, off we went on a new batchoy expedition on a convoy of two cars. The location was Santa Barbara, about 20 minutes away by car from the Richmonde Hotel Iloilo at the Megaworld Iloilo Business Park, where I was staying. Between Popoy’s and Sobredo’s, the latter gets plus points for being cooked on a traditional, if primitive, wood-fired stove, the former is cooked in a gas range. At Sobredo’s you can choose to order a pack of puto to go with it. The puto or rice cakes is supplied by Mang Dionisio Sildura, who tells us he sells up to 300 puto a day at the batchoyan. At Popoy’s, though, you can have puto too or you can have pan de sal, your choice, so Popoy’s gets the score on the subject of siding options.
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