_Is a bigger burger really better?  For me it depends on what you made it bigger with.  Now, if you're making that burger bigger with more real, high quality beef, then yes, a bigger burger definitely makes me happier!  If Pergola Mall were on my way home from work I'd probably be eating here more often.

My usual order here is the One Third Pounder, no cheese -- gotta watch the calories, and also because I usually want to enjoy the beef without diluting its flavor.  Normally this burger's enough to fill me up, so I don't even have to order sides unless I'm really starving.  BBB's burgers are thick, juicy, have the crumbly texture of an all-beef patty, and because they're grilled, have a lightly smoky flavor.  You may have to wait a bit for your burger on a busy day, because they grill each order fresh; me, I consider the wait worth it!

Taking Cat here for the first time -- she was in Davao when BBB opened -- we got the One Third Pounder, a side of Potato Wedges, and the Chicken Parmigiana rice meal.  We loved the potato wedges, nice thick slices of potato, skin on, crisp outside and perfectly cooked through inside.  Cat says if she can't have mashed potato, her fave potato dish, she'll gladly settle for this any time.  Me, I think my next order of burger will have to include this.  There goes the calorie count!  We also liked the Chicken Parmigiana, the sauce was nice and savory, and there's a generous topping of melted cheese on top.  I'm a sucker for melted cheese on rice, so again this dish is a winner for me.

_Still, if you're coming to Big Better Burger for the first time, you should be here for the burgers.  Yes, they're that good.  BBB's patties compare very well with the product of a classic Filipino chain we who're old enough to like retro stuff know well, but because it's grilled I'll have to consider BBB's even better. 

Big Better Burger is an up-and-coming chain with 10 branches already throughout Metro Manila, the Pergola Mall branch being their 8th.  The chain is owned and operated by the Teotico family, and interestingly enough is totally home-grown--it's not a US franchise at all.  Eric Teotico, who loves to cook, came up with the idea of opening a burger chain based on his own recipes.  Learning this story, I'm motivated to patronize BBB even more -- I like it when my peso goes to a local entrepreneur instead of a foreign corporation, and my palate tells me I'm getting value for my money. 

He said:

While admitting it inevitably betrays my true age, I just have to say that if there's one burger I think of when I'm nostalgic, it's Tropical Hut's Classic burger.  We rarely feature chains here in Good Living BF, since our focus is on 'homegrown' restaurants and enterprises, but we decided to do this as a fitting tribute to our favorite burger since the 1970s.   

Tropical Hut was a burger chain way before McDonalds came in, or Jollibee morphed from ice cream parlor to fastfood giant.  The BF Homes branch is up to now one of the longest-running Tropical Hut outlets in the country -- if I remember correctly it's their second or third branch.  When I was a kid studying at La Salle Zobel, I'd often badger my dad into taking me there after school before we made the long drive back home.  But Cat and I don't go to Tropical Hut to eat history.  We go because, very simply, Tropical Hut still serves the juiciest, most meatily fragrant burger we know.   

The Tropical Hut Classic stands out because it's cooked quite differently from other fastfood chain burgers.  I often find the meat patties from other chains rubbery in texture, probably from a combination of extenders and the dry cooking method they use.  In contrast, Tropical Hut's burgers tend to fall apart on you while you eat, while the buttery, utterly beefy juices run down your chin.  The secret is in the thickness of the patty and the pouring of a special sauce over the burger as it cooks.  As the outsides of the burger seal from the heat, the sauce gets trapped inside, keeping it tender and packed with flavor.  I'm drooling as I write this!  

Unfortunately, Tropical Hut was never managed with the same level of marketing savvy as its newer rivals, and the quality of its products can be uneven.  I've been to Tropical Hut branches that were badly maintained, that stank (I didn't eat at those!), and been disappointed with various menu entries.  The fries can be bland and soggy at times; at best, they're crisp but still rather plain, when compared to say McDonalds' fries.  Sometimes the staff are not as well-trained as they could've been.  

I hope one day to see Tropical Hut undergo a management renaissance.  Better training, better marketing, investment in more effective advertising.  But please, please, if ever this happens, do not change the Classic burger.  It's the reason why, despite all the warts, I still keep coming back to Tropical Hut.

She said:

As I am a few years older than Dariel, my memories of Tropical Hut burger go even more way back, back to where I think it started in Ortigas in the 70s.  But here I plead a senior moment because I cannot exactly recall the name of the place or the building.  But what has stayed indelibly in my mind was the experience of my first taste of the burger that was then making waves all over town.  
Simply put, it tasted like no other -- not that I could compare it with a MacDonald's or a Jollibee's because as Dariel said, they still had to hit town or hit it big at that time -- but that it had its own very distinct taste.  A taste that, thankfully, to this day has remained in the Classic Burger.

Part of its appeal was its bigger-than-normal serving size -- rivaled only by the equally famous Dayrit's hamburger -- which the Classic has kept; and part of it was the de luxe way it was served, with chips and potato salad if memory serves me right.  .

Over the years, as its rivals overtook it in popularity, availability, and visibility, it has tried to hang on stubbornly, sometimes perhaps too stubbornly for its own good as when it seemed to resist upgrading its branches, making them look like holdovers from the past century.  But at the same time, that stubbornness is what may have kept its loyal followers like me coming back for the Tropical Hut burger taste--it had kept the flavor that had made it an institution, a go-to for a burger fix, and a must-have for those midnight cravings.

The relatively few places it had branches in became my landmarks -- in Greenbelt and Crispa in Gil Puyat opposite the Makati Post Office; the Greenhills branch was another favorite stopover.  The first two are now gone; I haven't been to the latter in ages.  So I am happy that although as whimsical as the food industry can be, Tropical Hut has endured.  And that the Classic Burger is still a classic.

Now, my only quibble is why don't they have a branch in Davao?

A house built on soup.  That, in a nutshell, is Pat Pat's Kansi, a growing chain of Ilonggo restaurants whose core offering is a hearty beef soup called Kansi.  Cat and I got to visit the BF Homes branch and met owner Enri Rodriguez, who told us Pat Pat's story.

Pat Pat, it turns out, is an Iloilo lass who as a child kept asking for a particular beef soup from Bacolod.  It got to the point that her
mom, rather than taking the ferry to Bacolod just to buy the stuff, reverse-engineered the recipe and added her own touches to make the Kansi that would later take Makati by storm.  What's Kansi?  It's the Ilonggo version of Bulalo, beef marrow soup, but cooked with a sour fruit called batuan plus the secret herbs and spices added by Pat Pat's mom. It's so flavorful, says Enri, that there's no need to add soy sauce or patis to the soup as most Tagalog diners usually do with their bulalo.  Years later, the family put up a small restaurant along Kamagong in Makati.  It's now devilishly difficult to find parking along Kamagong at lunchtime, with so many of Makati's office workers heading for Pat Pat's Kansi.

Cat and I sampled the signature Kansi, the indispensable Iloilo/Bacolod favorite Chicken Inasal, Pork Barbecue and the Sizzling
Sisig.  First stop, the Kansi: we opted for the Kansi Laman (meat), an all-meat version, rather than the Bulalo (bone marrow) - I've been taking in too much cholesterol lately!  On my first spoonful of soup I could already tell this beef had been lovingly boiled into submission over a slow fire, the flavor was so rich.  Because we'd been shooting the other dishes the soup had gone cold, but Enri gave us fresh broth to bring our bowl of kansi back to steaming the way it should be enjoyed. The beef was very tender, and Cat, who usually takes her boiled beef with some kind of sauce, found she needed to add nothing at all as Enri smilingly advertised.  Me, I'm the guy who always likes fire on the palate so I used the provided calamansi, fresh chilies and soy sauce to make a hot dip.  Either way it went down great (had to try Cat's version too!).

The Inasal tasted just like those we had in Bacolod, smoky and tangy, while the Pork Barbecue was garlicky-sweet like the barbecue I grew up with.  Both went down very well, though I found a bit more gristle than I liked on one stick of the barbecue.  The Sizzling Sisig was a wow - really spicy the way I liked it, spiked with chopped chilies and fried to a crisp on a hotplate.  

You'd expect a place that serves sisig like this to be a beer drinker's haven as well, but here we found another unique aspect of Pat Pat's Kansi: in line with its original concept as a down-home, family-friendly place, alcohol simply isn't on the menu.  And because the owners want to keep the focus squarely on their strongest suits, the menu is restricted to only ten dishes, which if the four items we sampled are any indication they do really well indeed.

Speaking of menus, the place has been discovered by a new market--our Korean visitors.  A Korean traveler stopped by last year and found the food to be very much in line with the Korean taste.  So determined and enthusiastic was he to recommend Pat Pat's Kansi to his compatriots that he insisted to draw up a testimonial right there and then, which the Rodriguezes printed on a banner, and they now also have a menu with entries in Korean script.

Pat Pat's Kansi BF Homes branch is located at the lower level of Greenworld Plaza along President's Avenue.  The place has ample parking, a requirement which Enri says the franchisors wisely made a prime requirement.  The restaurant is Enri's first venture into the food business, and it's one he made based on his good relationships with the franchisors and his belief in the product.  As he narrates, he took his wife Lea to sample the Kansi, and she was sold on the idea immediately.  I have to say, after the first try we're sold on Pat Pat's Kansi too.