Hunan Lutong Bahay

Tapioca and I were always on the lookout for the best Chinese restaurant. When I read reviews from my favorite blogs about this hole-in-the-wall place in Makati, I knew I had to tell Tapioca about it. In no time we found ourselves in Camia St. Makati near the Rockwell Center.

According to the blog posts I've read, this Chinese restaurant opens at 10am. We arrived at exactly 10am and we were told that they open at 11pm. We didn't want to waste time waiting outside for them to open so instead Tapioca and I did a little tour around Rockwell. We returned at past 11pm where we saw a group of Chinese guys who had just finished their meal.

. . . our water served on a recycled coca-cola plastic bottle

By the way, this place is located in an apartment with no signage but it's not that hard to find. It's a no frills Chinese restaurant so please don't expect anything fancy. The menu is written in Chinese with photos of what the dish looked like. For non-Chinese speakers like us we just made turo-turo to the waitstaff the pictures of the dishes we wanted.

sauteed petchay baguio . . .

We wanted something to go with our meat dish and that's why we chose this vegetable. It was okay. Nothing special.

. . . mapo tofu

We love mapo tofu and when we found out it's available we did not think twice of ordering this dish. I was hoping it would turn out to be really spicy since Hunan cuisine is known for using chili and other spicy ingredients. Yeah,  I have low tolerance with spicy food but I just have to try it at least.  Unfortunately, I found the spiciness to be underwhelming. This certainly failed to impress us.

beef hot pot . . .

The restaurant's specialty was mostly hotpot so we had to try one. Tapioca decided to go with the beef. It was huge in serving. Prolly good for 2-3 people. The beef was surprisingly very tender and it was super hot hot hot! 

Now this was spicy. Too spicy for me. I only ate a few pieces. I did like the soup though. My first spoonful was like nothing. And then the hotness kicked in and felt the trace in my throat. Despite the huge serving, Tapioca was able to finish most of it.

. . . rice all you can

The rice-all-you-can worked for us to help with the spiciness of the hot pot. They have this rice cooker in a corner where you help yourself to cups of rice if you need more.

boiled dumplings . . .

This was my favorite. For Php100++ we got 10 pieces of these yummy dumplings filled with kutchay, meat and other vegetables. It tasted so fresh and we're glad we opted for it to be boiled and not fried.

Check out the translucent skin of the dumplings. You can almost see what's on the inside

We came with high expectations (because of the good reviews) but didn't really get blown away based on our experience. However, I would surely go back for the dumplings and the beef hot pot.