Hidden Treasure

Even though I love food, I've been a bit hesitant to blog about the subject, because I do realize that having eaten a lot of food does not automatically make one an authority in the judgement of its quality. However, I found this gem of a place along Banawe Street that made me throw caution to the wind, as the saying goes..

As a lifelong resident of Quezon City and having gone to high school somewhere near the Banawe district, I am quite familiar with the area; and through the years I have seen food outlets come and go. Having witnessed which businesses succeeded and which failed, I have come to have something of a conviction that the area's market for food requires a very specific price point. An economist might say that the demand for food in the district is very elastic relative to price - meaning demand can be highly reactive to every unit change in price. Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying that food in the area must be cheap, and I am most especially not implying that the people in the area are not financially well off. I know for a fact that in the midst of the unassuming auto supply and car accessory shops, reside many millionaires and possibly even a billionaire or two; but for some reason that is beyond my ability to analyze, for the most part, only food outlets with a very specific mid-range value proposition thrive in this area. That has been my observation through the years. The food outlets that find success in this area tend to have somewhat moderate pricing and, necessarily, a corresponding middling food quality.  So I was - and there is no other way to say this - plainly shocked when I had a late lunch at the 28 Treasures HK Roast + Dimsum sometime last week. I was stunned at how high the food quality was.

I had a number of reasons to expect that the food would be of somewhat average quality. First was my aforementioned observations about the neighborhood in general. Second, and I apologize to the business owner for being frank: the name had similarities to the names of two fairly new players in the roasted meats niche - 8 Treasures Roasting at the Dasmarinas Petron Station in Makati, and Hong Kong Little Kitchen in San Juan, especially its tagline - "The Home of Legendary Roasts". So this created, at least for me, a general feeling that this 28 Treasures place might be something of a "me too" copycat, with the attendant mediocrity. Third, the place was small. I'm poor at estimating these things, but I think it had maybe a 20-person seating capacity. Usually, a food outlet that commits to serving high quality food will have grander ambitions about the volume of business it will be doing, because you do need a large market to sustain a more expensive kitchen, and will prepare for this accordingly with a relatively large floor plan. Yes, there is a recent trend towards small places serving quality food, but with only a first impression as my only basis, of course I still reverted to more long-standing biases.

I tried only two dishes, and found quality to be very high. I made a deal with myself to try never to use the word "good" in my food posts because that is subject to personal tastes and really, who am I to judge? Quality though, probably has more objective benchmarks - like appearance, freshness of ingredients, etc., so I will be so bold as to venture there. As a quick example, hakaw afficionados will immediately recognize the plumpness of these little darlings and everything that this plumpness implies.

I find myself rooting for this place, because the quality of the food shows both great skill and pride in one's work - two things I admire immensely. Perhaps the owners should be forewarned though, that we have a running joke in my family that when I like a food outlet, then it is practically a kiss of death. 😀 To be fair I think this is partly because I tend to like quiet places and a quiet place generally means it hasn't really "clicked" with the public at large - or to put it more succinctly, the places I tend to like are those that haven't found, for some reason, a large following. This necessarily means that the places I like are generally in the midst of fighting an uphill battle in connecting with a sufficient market, and thus have the odds stacked somewhat against their finding lasting success.

Prices at 28 Treasures, while not really high especially given the quality, are on the higher end of the Banawe range, so I do have some concern about that. Additionally, the owners show no signs of having any social media savvy, and in this day and age of the 'gram, this could be detrimental to their prospects. They are on Waze though, so if you are so inclined, punch in the restaurant name and find your way towards the corner of N. Roxas and Banawe.