Cafeño in San Juan in Batangas

Old-house ogling in San Juan.

Aside from promising street after street of old-house-porn, coming to Batangas gives you all you want-- beaches and coffee. When driving to La Luz to splay yourself out on the sand, you first pass by San Juan, one of the many small, urbanizing towns south of Manila.


Warm fuzzy capiz windows and pointy roofs.

A lot of mid-sized Batangas towns were once fairly small economic activity. They retain a functioning, somewhat organic, layout. Plazas, small streets, old houses, churches that don't look like suppositories, and so on. In eastern(most) Batangas is San Juan,0 originally called Bolbok, from nabulbok or "bubbling" (referring to a "live" stream in the area). Eventually, bothersome flooding from the rivers Bancoro and Bangbang resulted in the transfer of the whole town to its current location.


Not far is the countryside.


Explanation of why the whole town was moved in 1869.

Of course, you will spot an old house that tells you to stop by. It bears the name "Cafeño" in a few different fonts, colors, and forms.


Hey, stop! Cool up in Cafeño!

My favorite being the bold yellow wall with simple illustrations.


A semblance of symmetry on the table.


Plus what?

Inside, you will find a cozy room with small objects collected through the years. The Western strain of cafe, together with a low-key but intuitive assembly of things and offerings illustrates the long-running sliver of cosmopolitan influence among small-town elites.


Old moka pots. Am unsure if they are in use.


Old bottles screenprinted with congressional campaign messages.

You can sit and read magazines while waiting for food that makes you nostalgic for rainy days with lola. Suman (steamed rice cake) with warm panotsa (coconut and raw sugar sauce), cacao with either churros or pinipig (pounded crispy rice).


Cacao with churros. One is a bit burnt, but still tasty.


Suman sa lihiya with panutsa sauce and latik (coconut oil dregs) on top.


Cacao with a siding of pinipig.

An oddity is the collection of several clocks bearing the times of different cities around the world-- a continental touch that seems a folly. The odd selection of cities-- Seattle, Seoul, Toronto, and Paris-- is printed on white paper, cut, pasted on colored paper, and wrapped in plastic, a la school bulletin board.


Time now is as follows.

Cafeño
No.9 Cor General Luna and Rizal St.
San Juan, Batangas

Bamboo Umbrella Stand

Type on Streets

Rice warehouse of Mindoro bigas.

A recent trip down south and the handpainted text along the road.


A cacao and coffee stall in Mabini. Eating a chocolate ball right now.


Another regional reference. Pangasinan Woodcraft, looking like Western Union.


"D'Almighty Ruler". Yep.


Jeep itinerary.

Bag of Sand

A spent rice sack filled with sand serves as an improvised punching bag, hanging from a tree.


Dangling from a rope, the size of a baby.

Suman In Tsokolate

Breaking the fast in the best way possible.

Every Saturday, a kakanin or rice snack vendor from Batangas sets up shop in the nearby market. He brings superb suman sa lihiya, which is a glutinous rice cake made with lye water, and greenish from the banana leaves it is boiled in. If sodium hydroxide in food sounds freaky to you, eating this just might change your mind. Lye-- traditionally derived from wood ash-- is found in Chinese noodle, century eggs, etc. It creates a too-alkaline environment for bacteria.

This type of suman, like our national daily pan de sal, has gotten considerably smaller throughout the years. So have the packets of brown, wonderful thick sauce made of raw sugar (panocha) and coconut milk.

Nevertheless, I rejoice at their arrival. Last weekend, I got some grated coconut, used some of it to make cream to thicken some cacao up, used some to sprinkle on the suman and mix in with the sauce. After awhile came the inevitable dunking of into chocolate.

What's better than suman sa lihiya?

...


Suman sa lihiya all dunked and bothered in cacao.

A Bit of Carinderia Love and History

1875 illustration of a carinderia in El Oriente newspaper.

I love carinderias. Whilst on long-haul buses I have a Pavlovian hunger-related reaction towards food stops. I like eating my way across the varying landscapes. Or, if there are no veggies or I'm oddly full, I poke around at everything-- what their bathroom signs say, what utensils they use, how the places are laid out, what language the people speak.


Wide selection of food in Puerto Princesa-- and this is only on the left side of the door!

These places prove that prepared food does not have to be soul-less like they are in many commercial restaurants. In smaller towns, they are a place for community to gather, like the Western coffee house. There you get free soup and the ability to make your own sawsawan (I prefer vinegar with siling labuyo broken up into it). If you sit in long enough you will also overhear stories about other locals from the patrons and the owners.


Communities can use less firewood if they cook in larger amounts, in this rural Batangas place.


Coming out to say hi.

Carinderias became widespread in rural areas only after increased human mobility, around the late 1800's. Before this, I picture people simply setting up large pots by their windows or in front of their houses, much like in more "isolated" areas today. People come walking over with bowls from their homes and buy a bit to take home.


Jackfruit (langka) with coconut milk sauce (I poured it all on my rice), standard carinderia fare.

Felice Prudente Sta. Maria notes that carinderia is most likely derived from the word cari or kari, a Tamil word for sauce, or a saucy accompaniment to rice. Some theories attribute this connection to the large number of breakaway soldiers from the invading British army, mostly East Indian Bengalis or Tamils, ended up settling in Taytay and Cainta, major tourist routes at the time. Note: I don't buy this theory of word origin.


Good ventilation at a bus stop to El Nido.


Even better ventilation at an outdoor carinderia.

Most memorable of their offerings was spicy cari (it has been posited that our peanut stew kare-kare had evolved from this East Indian-Javanese dish). However, their enterprises, primarily catering to some locals and many tourists from pilgrimages and train journeys, served things from food, tobacco, water, and alcohol. Notable was the serving of betel nut, much like India's paan stalls.


A simple layout in Dumaguete.

Over time, the stalls evolved to serve solely food-- indigenized Chinese dishes, Filipinized Spanish food, and these days some more Western-evolved creations (recently I saw a strange creation-- breaded and deep-fried hotdog wrapped in a pizza). Still mostly saucy and all, to drench your rice with. They still serve the cheapest and most abundant food. That they are moving away from serving regional plants and animals, are an indication that local, unique food is no longer cheap and widely available.


Pinakbet and Chinese-influenced pancit in Camiguin.

Palangke Eats and Etc.

One recent early morning, we ended up at the palengke (market) near the church of Anilao in Mabini, Batangas. I bought pinipig and some vegetables. And then, lured by campy 80s music, we decided to sit down for a post-breakfast snack at Robren's, one of the eateries bordering the wet market.

I had bulanglang, which is basically boiled vegetables of different sorts. It was only Php20 and pretty good. The okra, squash, and young papaya were all firm. However, I could taste the slight use of cubes in the broth-- MSG bombs, in other words. Ah, well, I enjoyed it anyway.



Rob had that Batangas specialty, lomi. It's basically a noodle soup with egg and pork in it. This one was strange. It was really sticky and goopy, with chicharon, ground beef and hotdog (!) on top. It was only Php25, and it seemed people flocked to Robren's Eatery to have it. Rob said it was pretty tasty, but was way too thick. I guess they put too much cornstarch.



In the palengke restroom, you have to leave your shoes outside and wear these wooden slippers so the floor doesn't get all dirty. This is because, like many provincial Filipino banyos, they like to keep the floor wet all the time to keep it clean. I figured this out too late, and by then my slippers had left mud marks all over. Ay!



Isn't it cute how the dots on this sign are little plates with spoons and forks?