Gold Dig #30

Rice Bar is a rare Filipino restaurant on Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants list. I’m guessing this has mostly to do with the fact that Filipino restaurants in LA are scarce compared to say Korean, Chinese, or Thai spots. My best friend growing up was Filipino, so I spent much of my youth at her house eating in a kitchen that seemed to have something cooking 24/7. Thus I was pretty excited about Rice Bar. The space was a lot like eating in her kitchen – you are pretty much seeing the entirety of it in the pic below, and the guys working there are so nice they make you feel right at home.

The Dish

Rice Bar does bowls, mostly of the rice variety as you may have guessed from the name (though they do have Pancit, which is a common Filipino noodle dish). Their rice is non-GMO, fair trade, imported from the Philippines. The size of the menu matches the size of the restaurant – there are a total of 6 bowls to choose from. We tried three of them between two of us, because they’re only like $9 per bowl and we couldn’t decide on just two. I’d definitely go back to try the other three.

Bisteg Tagalog

The Bisteg Tagalog is braised beef with pickled onions and fried shallots. The beef pieces that had a bit of fat in them were the best. The menu suggests getting red rice, which I guess you have to specify when you order, because we ended up with white rice. I would ask for red next time.

Chicken Tinola

The Chicken Tinola has a gingery broth, greens and rice that both nicely absorb the broth flavor, very tender chicken pieces, and some kind of root vegetable (I think) that was very nice. It might have been a bit salty to eat this dish alone, but it was great for switching back and forth between the three bowls. I especially loved the strong ginger flavor.

Pork Longganisa

The Pork Longganisa is a house-made sweet sausage common in Filipino cuisine. This one comes on a bed of garlic fried rice with a fried egg and pickled papaya. It’s essential to get a little bit of everything in each bite – the flavors complement each other so well. This was my favorite bowl, and I was pretty devastated when I somehow managed to lose control of a piece of sausage and sacrifice it to the floor gods.