Once a year, aside from celebrating New Year, we also celebrate Chinese New Year (also known as Lunar New Year or Spring Festival) separately. Chinese festival marks the start of the new year, beginning on the second new moon after the winter solstice and ending on the full moon fifteen days later.
The festival is usually referred to as the Spring Festival in mainland China, and is one of several Lunar New Years in Asia. It is celebrated during the first day of the first month in Chinese calendar (usually in between 21st of January and 25th of February).
Today (February 5, 2019), we celebrated Chinese New Year. Some people would take it as a chance to have a family reunion, some would just hangout with their friends and loved ones.
As for me, I took it as a chance to gather some of my few good classmates for one meal. This morning, we went out for a bike, since this is our opportunity to relax and free ourselves from all the stress that we face in our everyday life at school.
My friends and I went to River Park in Marikina and rented a bike for each one of us. We strolled the entire park for 2hrs straight.
The experience was enlightening as we enjoy the moment, being able to forget all the problems we have even just for a day.
We also took this chance to be as hungry as we can in order to prepare ourselves for our dinner later.
At 3pm later this day, we went to Sta. Lucia East Grand Mall. We roamed around in there for more than an hour.
By 5pm, we arrived at our destination where we will be taking our dinner. Which is the Kalye Unli Grill.
This is their price rate, for those people who are asking how much did we pay for.
We were 7 people so we payed for about 2800php plus 100php for the beer that some of my classmates ordered, so we spent almost 3000php for the entire dinner. Don’t get me wrong, there is an available drinks in the buffet which is also unlimited but you can order the beer at their bar separately. And since we ate on a holiday night, we were charged 398php per head but if you’re planning to eat on regular weekdays on lunch time, you will only spend 368php.
It’s not so bad for it’s price, we enjoyed eating and loading our stomach with tons of food. Though you might think that their food is limited, you can actually try all their food with 7 to 8 full plates. I only managed to eat 6 full plates with a full stomach and I can tell you that my cravings and taste buds are completely satisfied.
From the restaurant’s name itself, their specialty is streetfoods, but they also have some meat such as samgyeopsal, beef and pork strips marinated in different sauce, fish fillet such as cream dory, bangus fillet and others. There’s also cooked streetfood which you can eat without having to grill it such as the squidballs, hotdogs, siomai, fries, etc. They also have some vegetable side dishes. You can cook all the fresh meat because they have grilling tables.
Some restaurant with grilling tables is stressful because the smoke fills the entire place and it gets hot, but in here the smoke is being vacuumed by the tube thats right on top of the grilling table. This makes the restaurant smoke free.
And as for their dessert station, this one I find not quite satisfying because they only have 2 kinds of dessert, the halo-halo and ice cream. Which you can diy according to your own taste. I didn’t tried halo-halo because I’m not fond of it, but I did try their ice cream specifically the chocolate and buko salad flavor. The ice cream is limited because there are a lot of people and the dessert can be easily consumed, by the time I took mine there are only 2 flavors left because the other containers are empty. What I did like is the stick-o, they have a jar of it in the halo halo station which you can put as a topping or eat it as it is, depends on your liking.
All in all, it was a great experience for me and my classmates. We did not regret a single dime we spent for this restaurant. I recommend this to all people who wants to eat on a buffet with a tight budget, having about 500php is enough, including the transportation expenses since it is not that hard to get here.
By 8pm we all went home with our stomachs full and taste buds happy. Chinese New Year day well spent!
Foodgrammers 