Rambla adapts itself to many situations - the after-work evening tapas, the splurge with your date, the group dinner where everyone has fun, and dinner spills into drinks. I happened to be with some of my best friends and their newborn baby. True, we got lucky securing the perfect table on the ground floor of their two-story resto, but in general I'd say Rambla had no problem accommodating us. It may look small as you enter, with tables laid out in an L-style layout around their open kitchen, but there is also room upstairs, where there's a brightly lit bar and an aged liquor cabinet, and slightly dimmer, more intimate lighting for diners and drinkers. Because the exhaust was admirably strong without generating extra noise, I think it's nicer to sit downstairs. A more casual setup along the bar counter looking right into the kitchen, great for solo diners, is possible, and there is room left for wine bottles chilling in their own wine bucket stand. And so we ordered away, because we craved pork, and we translated that desire into jamon iberico and cochinillo. We had mini pizzas with Iberico on top, as well as jamon Iberico croquetas; tiny chorizo Iberico "baguettes" filled with a chilled manchego cheese cream, 65°C eggs with potato foam and chistorra, and paella de cochinillo. We only deviated from script to get chipirones (baby squid) with BCN sausage (Barcelona sausage, I think, I can't track down more info about this), and beans. We thought we weren't going to get full, because Rambla portions are "nouvelle," but we were wrong. (Please refer to the Refinery review I posted a few days ago; we went there and had almost no room left for their #awesomely #yummy bread pudding.) Can I just say I loved everything - and I mean everything - presented to us. If there was a way of chomping down dinner in an "haute," civilized manner, I think we invented it. We ate at a leisurely pace, and in that leisurely manner scarfed away the croquetas, the "baguetitos" and the mini pizzas, dipped bread into the egg, sausage and potato "foam" and ordered more bread, and daintily spooned every bit of ultra-tender baby squid into our plates, while thinking, this deserves to be a main dish, could you serve this in portions three times this size, please. The sauce in the chipirones dish is one of the best tasting things I've ever had, to be filed away in permanent memory. Now, true: if we hadn't ordered cold and warm tapas, there is no way the paella would've been sufficient. They could add a bit more rice, in my opinion - one scrape, and you know the layer of rice verges on thin. Nonetheless: the baby cochinillo, while not as crispy as some might like, tasted perfect to me, atop richly flavored rice, spiced with a hint of cinnamon. I've previously dined with the same friends at Las Flores, their sister restaurant inside BGC, so there was no way they were going to let us down. With a couple of fruit shakes, no cocktails, and no dessert, our bill went a little over P1,000/pax, so P1,500/pax just for dinner is probably a good amount. We left sated and duly impressed. read more