1st Visit - Josephine's Restaurant

I did it! My mom's in town, so I decided to take her to Josephine's Restaurant (2650 Main Street near East 10th, 604 876-8785). And I was pleasantly surprised! The room is open and spacious and well lit and the food is delicious. Much clearer and cleaner flavours than both Galing Galing and Goldilocks (I can't recommend Goldilock's savoury food unfortunately (it's OK but I like Galing Galing and Josephine's much more); their sweets and cakes are fantastic though!)

Click on the photo above for an annotated large photo labeled with my favourites. I had a combination plate for $7.50. This included sinigang (sour tamrind soup) plus two selections on top of a huge mound of white rice (why do Filipinos eat so much rice :-) ?). I chose mongo, a mung bean stew, (which we call balatong in our dialect) and BBQ pork. The pork was great; it had a wee hit of hot pepper, yum! The sinigang was nice and sour and not fatty which is how I like it! The balatong was OK; this kind of dish is always better home made but if if you don't have time to cook this definitely hits the spot.

Mom had pancit guisado (stir fried Filipino noodles). It was tasty but mine is better :-) but of course some people don't have that option!

Minor whingeing: food is served cafeteria style which I have complained about before. Like Galing Galing, if you get there within 2 hours of closing (we arrived at 7p.m. and Josephine closes at 8:30), they start running out of food. Since the food is served cafeteria style and not cooked on demand (except their pancit palabok which is cooked fresh), if you get there late in the day, some of the food may not as fresh as it could be.

All in all though, I was very happy and will be back for the palabok and to try some of their desserts which looked great!