UNo: A One time Deal
By: Jacob Juta
When the task of critiquing a restaurant and making it into a magazine was delegated to us in our Asianc1 class, we were lucky enough to get China as our restaurant’s theme. Mainly because of Chinese food that has always been part of our Filipino culture. Selecting a restaurant to eat in is a very stressful task for us, we really had a hard time to decide because of the abundance of authentic Chinese restaurants in the City of Manila Alone. I was the one who suggested that we eat in a restaurant called Uno Seafood Wharf Palace in Binondo, Manila. I first encountered this restaurant as a college freshman because of my block where around half of my blockmates were Chinese.
Uno Seafood Wharf is a restaurant in Binondo, Manila. It took us around 20minutes by car to reach it from Taft Avenue and luckily for us there were parking spaces in front of the building where the restaurant is. We were welcomed by the staffs of the restaurant, who in my opinion were a bit surprised to see young looking college students enter the restaurant noisily because most of the people eating there were mostly adults or senior citizens with their families or maybe for business.
We were approached by one of their waiters who brought with him the dimsum cart so that we could immediately start with our lunch. Because of our hunger, we immediately requested for steamed pork siomai, hakaw and beancurd roll. The servings were the typical Chinese serving of four dimsum in a bamboo steamer. The pork siomai was my favourite among the three maybe because it was the most flavourful one and the meat is really popping out of the wrapper. The hakaw and the beancurd roll wasn’t that special and is something similar to other Chinese restaurants for a cheaper price.
While eating our dimsum, another waiter approached us and handed out the menus and waited for us to take our orders. One thing you’ll always notice in Chinese restaurants, especially in UNO is the number of dished found in their menu, it’s something I find to be a tedious task when ordering because you’ll have a hard time to look for the one you want. We ordered the Yangchow first because we were really hungry and the dimsum felt like nothing in our stomachs. The only thing I find wrong with their menu is that the soup choices were not printed in it.
"tasted very bland and the sauce wasn’t even that consistent."