Cianô

Ahsen Akay

4.0

“Celebrating 80 Years of Simple Life” is a post about my grandmother’s 80th birthday. There I wrote that we brought her to Barrio Fiesta, a restaurant that delivers authentic Filipino cuisine where we had a great lunch. Indeed, nothing beats Filipino food. That is why for my grandmother’s 81st birthday, we decided to take her to a restaurant that serves provincial favorites making you reminisce the flavors of home and all those good old days of food, fun and family.

Summerprincez

2.0

I went to Ciano one wet afternoon, craving for a filling meal.  Ciano, I assume, is short for provinciano, which tells you right away the restaurant serves Filipino fare. Filipino restaurants are a dime a dozen so you kind of expect the restaurant to serve really good food to stand out from the rest.  Because Ciano's meals are mostly good for two to three persons, I opted for a breakfast meal, which is apropos for solitary geezers like me.  The breakfast fare consists of various variations of silogs. I chose tapsilog because the waitress recommended it as their bestseller. The meal consisted of two perfectly fried sunny side up eggs (dry yolk spells perfection), a cup of fried rice, a small gob of achara, and a few slivers of tapa. The tapa was tender and succulent but was short on flavor.  For a PhP190 peso meal, I felt it was not worth it. I have had better tapsilogs in street corner carinderias that cost less than eighty pesos. The moral of the story is, the waitress should not have recommended a bestseller that was clearly not up to par in taste. I would never come back for seconds with such a disappointing first meal.