il Pirata, Ecstasy
Let me just say that I am not a very big fan of themed restaurants. So, upon arriving Sunday night at il Pirata over at Eastwood City, I was a little suspect. Il Pirata is supposedly a pirate-themed restaurant which boasts of authentic Italian cuisine replete with exotic herbs and spices from the Mediterranean.
From the outside, it doesn’t look at all promising; what with the cheap-looking wooden exterior, gold accents and grinning skulls that make the entire pirate theme look forced, and a pirate ship/kids’ playground which looks like it came straight out of a B-movie.
The restaurant was actually the girl friend’s pick and as with most of her choices as far as restaurants are concerned, it was a little too awkward for me primarily because unlike most people, I do not have this blind fascination with pirates. So yeah, I do not want to run a fantasy of hoisting the Jolly Roger flag and hidden treasures through my head concurrently while I eat. I’m a very pragmatic man and all I really want to do at restaurants is get in, eat my food, check out hot women (and of course go to the rest room every 10 minutes or so for some hand comfort) and get the fuck out to smoke a cigarette. Read more
Aryty, Buffet Line yay!
Saturday, I, along with the country’s most influential bloggers (bear with me), were invited by PinoyCentric’s bureau chief Karla Maquiling for an intimate lunch with Aryty.com’s CEO Nils Johnson and creative director Daniel Neumann at Shangri-La Makati’s Circles event cafe.
I think I’ve mentioned before how things like these make me feel uncomfortable and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was iffy with the idea the whole time. However, I’ve heard a lot of great things about the lunch buffet at Circles and really, there are only a few things in the world that could make me extremely happy and teaching an Israeli boy how to crochet, and being in an awesome buffet line ranks high on the list. (Sex comes in somewhere around 5th spot right below “Arson”)
But yeah, I was still uncomfortable as fuck so with my armpits assured of dryness thanks to two handkerchiefs I stuffed in them, I drove to the Makati Shangri-La and met up with Karla, Jayvee, Gail, Angelo, Ederic, Sasha , Markku, Aileen and Ajay to partake in an extravagant culinary festival brimming with free prepaid phone credits, urine, neuroses and rancour. (I know I’m missing the point here. Whutev.)
When I got in the function room, I felt tense. Afterall, I was with the crème de la crème of local blogging and again, how does a guy who squanders whatever fame and influence he has on hundreds and hundreds of words’ worth of dick/racist jokes fit in? I actually spent a good 30 minutes, talking to nobody as other people who passed by me in the restaurant shot me scowls and shook their heads at me in disgust as I sweat the fuck all over the place and at one point, even spilling roast beef on the floor while my right hand made a sortie down my crotch to touch my genitals–as I am inclined to do whenever I feel uncomfortable or threatened.
(also, the fact that I saw Reema Changco, said hi to her [because I'm famous myself] and got ignored didn’t help ebb my anxiety.)
But eventually, things settled down, I got introduced to Nils and Daniel (Who’s so fucking dreamy by the way, I couldn’t conceal my monster erection when I shook his hand–something he promptly noticed and things got all weird between us thereafter), and realized that we were nothing more but a bunch of geeks gabbing and having lunch.
Soon Nils stood up and I was pretty sure everybody was thinking the same thing “Boo, a presentation just when I want to devour the exorbitant amount of food I helped myself to from the buffet table. Whatever, I’ll just sit through this–Wait is that roast beef on Mike Villar’s plate? And is that maple syrup he’s putting on it? Also, why is he sweating that much?”
On Fine Dining
Thursday. Marc, Riz, I and my company’s other department heads went to Shangri-La Makati’s Shang Place to have dinner with our company’s CEO and the COO.
Now a couple of things you should know about me: First, I don’t like fine dining and second I don’t like fine dining in a restaurant situated inside a swanky Makati Hotel because really, fine dining in Makati makes me sad.
This is largely because of the anxiety and the feeling of vulnerability and insecurity places that are imposingly fashionable and elegant make me feel. I mean come on, these places have rich beautiful women and douchebag businessman-types all over and you know everyone’s going to get some sex at the end of the night while on a regular night, my squatter friends and I are on the other side of the metro probably sitting on the curb sniffing Ovaltine Powder trying to get fucked up because we ran out of Emperador Brandy and none of us have any money left to get some more.
My anxiety was further exacerbated when we were waiting for our table to be ready and I was treated to an exhibition of groups of successful-looking, 30-ish, expatriates talking obnoxiously about something called “Attrition” who would, from time to time, pause to eavesdrop and smile condescendingly at another group from another table because they’re only talking about “The difference between the market value of our property and the claims held against it.”
Aside from these types of people, there were also young men and women who were obviously on their first dates as I heard most of them talking about their interests and shit (and face it, if you’ve been dating a girl long enough, you should be arguing with her about why she should be on the pill so you can come inside her whenever you want and not listen to her talk about how she likes Victorian architecture. That’s just silly.) Also, it looked like the ladies were wearing shoes that cost more than my parents’ first house. So yeah, sad.
What’s sadder is after they get a good buzz going from drinking expensive-ass wine, they’d probably have this conversation:
Slutbag girl: “Hey listen, you got me dinner which probably costs more than what that guy standing there makes in a month [points at me. Standing in a corner, looking at my shoes, sweating the fuck all over the place.] But I never got around to asking you what you do.”
Douchebag guy:“I’m the Vice President for International Operations of a BPO company. I have an degree on Douchery from Stanford which I leveraged to land me this high-paying job which will pay for my Porche and my beach house in Cancun. How about you? What do you do?”
Slutbag Girl: “Well I’m an Editor for–”
Douchebag guy: “Hey listen, want to go up to my room, snort some lines and fuck? It’s going to be pretty rough and there is a good chance that I’ll spit at you and call you Apollonia.”
Slutbag Girl: “K!”
The dinner itself was pretty uneventful and I really don’t have anything funny to tell you besides the fact that the Waitresses over at Shang Place were grade-A bitches. There were numerous instances when I ordered a drink and the waitress was like “I’ll bring it to you in a couple of minutes sir” when she really meant “Sir, you obviously bought your shirt from The Surplus Shop and it couldn’t have cost you more than 100 Pesos. Also, you’re not very good looking and you sweat a lot so I think I’ll get around to bringing your drink after I alternate between serving everybody else their drinks and shooting you looks of pity and utter disgust.”
But the night’s pièce de résistance came when they served us Chinese cookies and sesame balls for dessert. Being the highly cultured person that I am, I thought the Chinese cookies were Fortune Cookies and proceeded to dig into the pastry looking for a piece of paper where my supposed fortune is printed.
The aftermath: Crumbs, fudge and icing all over my shirt and the definite, imminent end of my career.
Heaven. On Earth.
There are a few things I can consider myself to be definitively good at: Yeah sure I am good at alienating my friends by playing with my scrotum in front of them and sure I am good at getting free sex from young girls suffering from Down Syndrome; but if there’s anything in the world I could consider myself an expert at, it’s got to be Fast Food.
(Also, I lied. I’m not good at getting free sex from young girls suffering from Down Syndrome. In fact, this only happened once when my bestfriend JL’s sister who happens to have Downs, mistakenly wandered into the bathroom while I was taking a poop. The rest, as they say, is history. Also, she cried so I have to give her 200 pesos to shut her up. So yeah, not free. Whatever.)
My adeptness with fastfood is fortified with such academic resilience that in the 5 years I was in college, I was able to come up with a detailed, 50-page white paper which analyzes which combination of McDonald’s food items would give you more bang for your buck.
Now I know that two cheeseburgers at 35 Pesos each trumps a double cheeseburger at 69 Pesos as far as being filling is concerned.
I also know that McDonald’s Katipunan uses Nestea iced tea and they prepare it in dirty plastic buckets where it is invariably spat on and stirred using the dirty hands of a pimply squatter store manager who graduated from NCBA in ‘98.
So, since then, I’ve been pretty much going with my killer two Cheeseburgers, two regular fries, large coke combination for my fastfood fix and I was more or less convinced that this combination is quite possibly the greatest food combination my Asian currency can buy. Until lately when I was introduced to KFC’s glorious Garlic Chicken Steak.
For you people who haven’t tuned in to local television programming for the past month or so, KFC is pitching a product called Garlic Chicken Steak and these steaks, depending on how much you value your health, can be the collective manifestation of how capitalist machinations are exploiting the public, or, in my case, HEAVEN ON FUCKING EARTH.
Why you ask? Well three reasons: 49 Pesos. Sizable chicken fillet smothered in garlic sauce. Coke.
Now I’m admittedly fat and celebrate everything that has to do with my being fat so you’re probably thinking how such a modest amount of food can make a guy like me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Also, horny.
The answer dear friends, again, lies in combinations. Now the meal itself may not be much but throw in a regular Hotshots, two extra orders of rice, regular coleslaw and upgrade your drink to a large coke and you have something that costs a little over 120 Pesos yet is so fucking filling and so fucking good that one cannot talk about it without stopping to masturbate.
[I need a few minutes here]
[Ok]
This combination is so fucking awesome that sometimes I feel that there’s a catch there somewhere. Like, I dunno, maybe you have to give up your soul or maybe your retarded brother when you order this combo because really, assloads of boneless chicken? Three servings of rice? Coleslaw? Large Coke? I mean come on people, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.(As I learned back in the summer of ‘84 when I was held captive by a bunch of Canadians and was forced to simultaneously eat, shit, drink and have sex three times a day for a year. Also, after they released me, I spoke Spanish.)
Anyway my first encounter with said combination was earlier at lunch. When the meal was served to me, I actually didn’t think much of it. The garlic chicken fillet itself looks like a mishmash of something that resembles chicken, wood carvings and the piss of somebody who has hepatitis. But since I was so hungry earlier, I didn’t let anything get between me and my food. Not even the fact that I saw one of the minimum wagers in the kitchen scooping rice and putting it on my plate with his bare, mangy hands.
But after I put the first spoonful of garlic chicken steak and rice in my mouth, I realized that my fortitude paid off as THE GARLIC CHICKEN STEAK TASTES LIKE WHAT CLOTHED SEX WITH JESSICA ALBA WOULD TASTE LIKE. IT WAS FUCKING HEAVEN!
In a matter of minutes, I was shimmying, happily mixing the contents of my plate and mashing it with my hands until everything looked like oat meal and eating the fuck away.
I got so into it that my officemates who were eating with me at that time probably felt a sense of envy at how happy I was with my food. Actually, envy or utter disgust. (In retrospect, it’s probably disgust as I had my flaccid penis peeking out of my open zipper while doing all of this.)
So there, don’t expect a lot of updates from me because I intend to devour as much of my killer Garlic Chicken Fillet combination as humanly possible and after the day ends, I’d stagger home so fucking full that I wouldn’t have sufficient willpower to undress myself, pop in my Sarah McLachlan CD and take a shower as I stick two fingers up my butt; let alone, write a blog post.
So Adios fuckers.
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The Star
Mike "Fucking" Villar
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"The personal blog of Marketing Strategist, Rising Internet Star, Man Blog editor, child pornographer, alcoholic, and cokehead-- Douchebag Jones--Err, Mike Villar! -
