Wednesday, April 3, 2019

The Brown Derby

Ah, the power of a sign. Every time I would chance upon this sign along Calamba St. in the Banawe District, I always found myself feeling like how I imagine Anthony Bourdain must have felt every time he passed by a bun cha shop in Hanoi. As he once put it: "...bare aluminum table, low plastic stool, crummy neon light, early warning signs of great things to come..."

I do know the general feeling he is referring to - it really does seem like certain sights do fill us, or at least me, with a sense of presumptive expectations about the quality of an upcoming experience - whether gastronomic or otherwise. With a name like "The Brown Derby" and a color scheme that reminded me of the 60s, I suspected the original owner  was probably a baby boomer and was the type who wore white toe shoes and socialized in a derby hat. Surely, I said to myself, a man with that sense of style must have taken great pride in the food he produced. Belatedly, I found out that the name was probably just lifted from a restaurant chain in California that had its heyday in the decades after World War II. Ooops...

Yesterday, with the imagined, apparently erroneous back story still in my mind, I stopped as I drove past. I must say that the visuals of the place did nothing to detract from the narrative swimming within the confines of my mind that i still wanted very much to believe up to that point. Many details had a certain charm, like the bell one rang for service.

The first disappointment was that the place primarily sold all types of noodles and the local dessert pichi-pichi. I say disappointment because I felt this was totally inconsistent with a name like "Brown Derby". Determined to stay with my picture of an owner who wore a derby hat, I stubbornly ordered the item on the menu consistent with that image. For P49 I got myself a all-meat footlong hotdog.

 I must say that the place appears to be doing great, as the phone rang off the hook with orders in the few minutes I was there, so the noodles (many types) must be good. Either good or popular, most probably both.

As for the hotdog sandwich, it was okay. I would probably prefer it to the the usual run-of-the-mill hotdog sandwich one finds at the concession stands at the local supermarket. Would I make a special trip to get one? No. Would I have late-night cravings for one? Probably not. It was okay though.