The Beef with Tarlac Is That It's Too Hot for Bulalo.

Being in Central Luzon has its perks.

You get exposed to at least three cultures.  Ilocano, Kapampangan and Tagalog. With these, their cuisines.

Ilocanos are known for cooking awesome vegetables. Pakbet Ilocano. Nobody needs to say more than that.  Meats are awesome too with bagnet, and we have the local incarnation of that little piece of heaven (go cholesterol! lol) with chicharron Camiling.

Kapampangans are the cuisine lords of Luzon. It's a generally established fact. Sisig please! Plus the Kapampangan version of dinuguan is my personal favorite.

There's also the usual adobo, and many chevon dishes. Rice cakes. Ugh. Food in Tarlac is awesome, really. But all that's really not the point of this post.

The beef with Tarlac, however, is that it's a bit too hot for bulalo. Oh bulalo. Beef, the king of meats, in its purest Filipino cuisinal incarnation is hard to appreciate in Tarlac.  When you say bulalo of course, you go to either Baguio or Tagaytay. However, let me be a bit hipster here and say that those places could be too mainstream. Lol kidding. The pleasure of eating bulalo in Baguio or Tagaytay of course comes with the mountainous climate.

The point of this post? I just had the best bulalo I've had in my entire 26 years of existence. And it's in a very nondescript place in Tarlac. Just outside Triple 888 Coliseum, in Capas. BULALO. IN TARLAC. How?!

Left: Google Maps screenshot of where to find that bulalo. Right: Google Street View of the closest landmark, Triple 888 Coliseum.

I can imagine having the dish with my beer, or after my beer. Or in the monsoon weather. Or right about January when the wind isn't so warm, which includes now so...

Shantal's Eatery as shown in Google Street View. 

The place is called Shantal's Eatery. It's really not your Instagram-worthy hipster kind of setup with the wire-mesh and naked concrete exteriors, Monobloc chairs and plastic Coca-cola tables (for the record, hipster now is mainstream, so what's the point? lol)... but the bulalo is just divine.  We had a meal in Shantal's. 2 large bowls of bulalo, a serving of bistek, 5 cups of rice and a bottle of C2 Litro. All that for 220. TWO HUNDRED TWENTY LANG *#@!%%(!!!!

Not your ordinary bulalo in a very ordinary presentation.

Now on to the bulalo! Putting the flesh apart was like separating strands of corned beef. It was that soft! Despite that, it didn't have the mushy quality you get from really bad canned corned beef. The taste was also perfectly balanced. It wasn't too salty, and wasn't too rich but had the right umami. Sebo pretty much was nonexistent. I remember getting greasy lips applying chap stick but this bulalo did not give me one bit of that icky feeling anywhere in my mouth. There's about two wombok leaves tossed in there too, not that it matters but hey, it's something!

So if I'm gonna act like a food blogger, might as well have 100% internalization and on to the scores!

Taste: 9/10

Texture: 9/10

Presentation: Kusina ni lola/10

Surprise factor: 10/10