Ketchup: Food Community — Rumah Sate

My friend and I picked Ketchup: The Food Community because it was new and she certainly wasn’t setting foot at SM City Baguio. 😀 We both knew it was a food community — so there’d be many food choices.

True enough. Ketchup had Rumah Sate, which serves Malaysian-Indonesian food, Cafe Circolo, offers the familiar western style eats — shakes, fries, burgers, pasta and such, Canto, is also here famous for their lomo ribs, Happy Tummy offers Thai food and Rancho Norte with Filipino favorites including horse meat tapa. All these places in one spot. And you can sit in one resto and order from the others without leaving your seat– and they’re all put together in one bill!

Ketchup: The Food Community is just 3 months old. They just recently opened on March of 2012. It’s like an outdoor food court. I can imagine mini-concerts and such held here. So much potential for this place.

The entrance. I read somewhere that “ketchup” actually was derived from the phrase “catch up” as in “hey, it’s been too long, let’s ketchup soon”

On my first visit, I covered 4 of the 5 restos inside. Cafe Circolo, Rumah Sate, Canto and Rancho Norte. For a person on a budget, that ain’t bad at all, eh? The trick is to gather a group of friends so you can each order from a different place and try each other’s food.

Rancho Norte’s corner

Canto’s corner :). Not sure how they’ll typhoon-proof their place.

Happy Tummy’s own private place in the lot.

Three rain catchers make the lovely entrance of Rumah Sate

There’s a separate blog post for Cafe Circolo, where I had my first Ketchup meal that I had alone while I waited for my friends.

This particular blog entry is mostly about Rumah Sate and a little about the others.

An old colleague of mine was there, in charge of making our plates look beautiful. So when I asked for the specialty, I quickly obeyed. I ordered  beef satay.  A pretty safe choice compared with the other meals like the one that had goat testicles and such.

My order looked really purtty specially with the cone shaped rice, capped with banana leaf (a part of the leaf..haha). There were 3 sticks of beef satay and there also was cucumber topped with sambal on the side. Sambal was pretty spicy, as it should be. :). My beef was prettty chewy. And it shouldn’t be. My chef-friend said that they cooked it wrong. In the meantime she ordered the funky named bangus belly meal. She wasn’t too happy but was content.

Vietnamese Spring Roll…Now this is how it’s supposed to look like. Not like the ones in Ocha in Session Road.

So much extra space on my plate.Could’ve been filled with more satay! 🙂

The bangus belly meal. I know, the bangus is kinda hard to find, eh? I see the tomato and egg and cucumber. 🙂

Our side dishes. Would love more of the pickled cucumber.

I did love the dips(?) or uhm– side dishes that it came with. They complimented my order well. For drinks, I ordered the tamarind juice. Imagine Moni Gold. Now imagine drinking it– that’s how it was like :). Another friend order the up-side down halo halo. ( I dint take notes, I left it at Cafe Circolo). It was like the pinoy halo halo without all the camote but with lots of buko strips. If it were a person, it would be described as flamboyant. A few hours and desserts later, I also ordered their lemon-lime drink. My friend had the cherry drink. They were so purrrty. And both were super refreshing too.

The upside down halo-halo or ays something. Indonesian names are so hard to remember.

Pretty drinks for the pretty ladies.

All in all, I’d give my Ruma Sate experience 2.5 out of 4 stars. I love the drinks and the refreshing upside down halo halo but was looking for more on our main course. Perhaps on our next visit, we ought to order the goat testicles meal or — maybe the Laksa. I heard goat balls were hard to get a hold of. heehee.

Now for the others:

Canto: Ordered the red velvet cake. Loved the cream cheese (cheesecake?) part of it but wasn’t jumping up and down for the red velvet part. I asked my chef-friend how they  make it red — apparently it’s just food coloring. All my dreams fell apart. Haha. This was complimented with the herbal fusion tea drink our good ole friend from Rumah gave us.

Red Velvet Cake from Canto

Rancho: Had puto bumbong. Nothing noteworthy or unusual in here. I just wanted to help local economy and would feel bad if we had Rancho left out. 😀

Total damage was 910 pesos for 4 people. It was such a lovely place to hang out. Lots of open space and breeze and nice green surroundings. Not a good idea to come here in stilettos though. Your heels will dig into the stoney ground. I love the quirky architecture, very Baguio looking but  I keep wondering how it would hold up during typhoon season. Oh well.

Wall-less, breezy Canto corner

View from the entrance. The big cheese-like structure in the middle is Cafe Circolo, owned and designed by the owner of the Ketchup lot.

Will definitely be back for Happy Tummy. I wanted to order Pad Thai or something but I was just too full.

All in all, Ketchup is a great alternative to foodcourts and the food lane on Session Road. I love how all these Asian inspired restos are coming out in Baguio. I’m excited to discover more good eats at Ketchup.