Treasure Island

Filipino food gets a face-lift at Old City's Cebu.

by Elisa Ludwig

It was score one for the foodies when the owners of Old City's World Fusion decided to close the culinarily impaired cocktail emporium and reopen with a new, more focused identity. And since that same ownership, the Encarnacion family, is responsible for Manila Bay, a fantastic, long-running Filipino restaurant in the Northeast, it's an extra bonus that their restaurant's new identity is Filipino.

MINI SKIRT: Cebu's skirt steak is cooked in red wine and wrapped around crab meat mashed potatoes.   Photo By: Michael T. Regan   (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Cebu, which shares an address with City Paper in the Corn Exchange Building, has inherited a room roughly the size of the island it's named after. Enormously high ceilings are painted with clouds, and the space is equipped with Corinthian columns and a bar that could easily accomodate the island's entire population for happy hour. Cushy, intimate booths and palm trees hint at the supper clubs of another era, while a DJ stand and cocktail lounge remind you that, yes, this is still Philly in the aughts. The overall effect is pleasing — sans the faux floral arrangements mounted like game on the wall — and the atmosphere will envelop you in its gelled-light warmth.

If that doesn't do it, a slice of homemade peppercorn and dill bread slathered with guava butter might. No? Slug back a house cocktail like fresh fruit sangria or the El Nido martini, an orange juice-spiked mixture of white Godiva liqueur and Stoli vanilla served in a glass with a graham-cracker-crumb-dusted rim.

For the most part, the menu will be familar to patrons of Manila Bay — only here the classic dishes like pork adobe and oxtail kare kare are given the Big White Plate treatment. (Whether or not these same patrons will want to pay $50 a pop for the luxury of dining in Old City is anyone's guess.)

For the uninitiated, Filipino food is an earthy, hearty stew of Spanish, Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, Mexican and English influences. So you get soy sauce, rice, paella, coconut and a whole lot of peanuts thrown in for good measure.

The best way to get your feet wet is Cebu's appetizer trifecta, a tiered doohickey that combines three different starters of your choosing. We sampled the kinilaw, raw tuna marinated in vinegar and served with a cool coconut sauce and sweet coconut gelée. From another tier we ate slices of tender pork adobo, cooked in a garlicky vinegar and soy sauce with snow peas. Finally, there was the lumpia shanghai, a crispy but delicate spring roll better than anything you've ever seen on a pu pu platter. It's packed with julienned carrots, scallions, ground shrimp and pork and served with a trio of equally tasty sauces: coconut, mango and soy.

An unfried version, the pinoy lumpia, is like a Vietnamese summer roll stuffed with chunks of lobster meat, bell pepper and mango. I love the unusual flavors of the chicken tinola soup with its creamy ginger broth and floating green taro leaves.

There's nothing exotic whatsoever about the tender skirt steak in red wine sauce, the meat arranged like a ruffle around crabmeat mashed potatoes and hot garlicky spinach — but it's thoroughly enjoyable all the same. Unfortunately, I did not get to try the $60 Wagyu steak, which seems like your typical high-priced beef item designed for male patrons with fragile egos and black AmEx accounts. (Does anyone else ever fall for these gimmicky dishes?)

It's worth noting that the rest of the hefty price tags are proportionate to the gigantic servings. The oxtail kare kare features the largest oxtails I've ever seen, and the dish, with its unctuous bits of meat stewing in a velvety peanut sauce, is delicious, provided you don't get the undercooked, unchewable slices of Japanese eggplant that we found in ours.

Though it's equally generous in its array and volume of crustaceans — lobster, king crab legs, shrimp, scallops, mussels and calamari — I was less enchanted with the seafood kare. The lobster was overcooked to near-rubberiness and several of the mussels had broken, making the stew a treacherous swirl of shell bits.

Better bets are the duck pancit, medium rare slices of duck breast fanned around a diaphanous nest of mung bean vermicelli with a sweet fleshy banana sauce and sauteed kangkong greens (also called "swamp" spinach); or the shrimp gata, a kind of coconut curry that's perfumed with lemongrass and served over garlic rice.

If ever there were a dessert that represents the bounty of Filipino cuisine, it's halo-halo, a whimsical mix of preserved beans, spots of flan, coconut gelatin, condensed milk, shaved ice, banana and other tropical fruits. Also, ice cream. Each bite is a different mix of creamy sweetness punctuated by chewy nuggets of bean or fruit. Another favorite is the turon, a delicate spring roll filled with banana that's served warm and presented with sliced strawberries, strawberry ice cream and a drizzle of chocolate sauce.

Really, there's no need to go trotting around the globe when you can stick to the Philippines. And if you've got funds, there's no need to drive to the Northeast now, either.

(e_ludwig@citypaper.net)

Cebu

123 Chestnut St., 215-629-1100, www.cebuphiladelphia.com

Hours: Daily, 5-11 p.m. (bar open until 2 a.m.)

Appetizers, $8-$25; entrees, $20-$60

Wheelchair accessible.Reservations accepted. Credit cards accepted.