Our first meal outside the home of our gracious host in Baguio is at Solibao Restaurant in Burnham Park. We are looking for a near and inexpensive place for all 14 of us in the group, and our boatman recommended this casual restaurant serving Filipino food.
The restaurant is located beside the Burnham lake, on the edges of the Melvin Jones Grandstand with a football field. The ambience is very Filipino with wooden wall carvings as well as wooden furnitures. I think they are also famous for puto bumbong (glutinous dark rice in tubes) and bibingka (baked glutinous rice powder baked in charcoal with coconut shavings), which they prepare on a hut outside of the main restaurant.
The menu is quite extensive and prices are reasonable. We ordered binagoongang liempo (pork belly with shrimp paste for Php 260) as recommended by our boatman, and it proved to be a very good dish. Even the kids like it. The assorted grilled pork and seafoods in a bilao (Php 465) is forgettable, so stay away from it.
The sinigang na malaga/samaral (spinefoot fish in sour broth) is good, though not as good as those freshly-caught varieties in Pangasinan. The portion size and taste of their kare-kare (beef in peanut stew sauce) is value-for money. With other food items like pancit (noodle), fried bangus (milkfish), rice, and coconut drinks (Php 110/pitcher), our combined total bill of around Php 2700 is reasonable enough.
There are only 2 downsides on this restaurant. First is the dirty male washroom as I saw a dead cockroach on the window sill, plus no water on their urinal. Second is the slow and inattentive service, as we have to call them many times to get our orders, then took them 20+ minutes to deliver. This may be understandable as there are simply too many guests during the Panagbenga festival. If I ever come back to this place, I may give them another chance to redeem themselves, and I will try their rice cakes.
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