Five stars for food -- Two stars for service -- Still four stars overall.
The namesake kare-kare is very good. Make sure to avail of the condiments, especially the bagoong (shrimp paste) which is extremely good. The gising-gising is also the best I ever had. Finally, order the callos, which is a Spanish inspired tripe dish. Finally, their juice drinks are very strong as well. If you order enough food, you can get an order of crispy pata for P33 as a promotion, so it's nice to come with a group so that this is easy. So food -- super solid and would love to have this kind of cooking available in restaurants in the USA.
Service was another story. there was a machine at each table for calling the staff to request the bill, water, and a button for every other kind of service. Naturally, this was a joke, and it never worked. It got to the point where we had to get up and flag people down who were rushing by us. I think someone in our party also started needling them as we realized the service was kind of lousy, so maybe we got on the shit list for doing that and the service got even lousier. Not sure.
Still, in my opinion it's worth it to come here. Note that the branch I visited was on the 2nd floor of the SM City Annex, not The Block. read more