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This Filipino storefront morphed from an unassuming steam-table setup into a just slightly more assuming full-service restaurant with a crackerjack kitchen. The menu reads like a culinary primer to one of the world’s great melting-pot cuisines, a crazy quilt of Chinese, Spanish, Mexican, Malay, and Indian influences, and with most main dishes hovering around the $8 mark, you can afford to do a little globe-trotting. Go for the adobo (on-the-bone pork and chicken stewed in vinegar and soy sauce), the giant stuffed-eggplant frittata of sorts called relyenong talong, and anything topped with the super-crispy skinned lechon, like the Bicol Express—a yin-yangy simmer of incendiary chiles and creamy coconut milk. For dessert, do what the chalkboard sign propped up outside the restaurant says and order the halo-halo, the cooling crushed-ice-fruit-and-bean concoction that’s like an Orange Julius on acid. — Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld

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