For the past few months I had been wanting to visit the StrEat: Maginhawa Food Park at UP Village, Quezon City.
When I finally did, the scene looked inviting—colorful food trucks, trendy food stalls, and picnic tables with yellow umbrellas.
In succeeding weeks I noticed how the crowds had grown—from sparse to packed to bustling, with mostly young customers. This roused my curiosity even more.
After Sunday Mass, my son Diego and I proceeded to StrEat for our dinner date. It was raining quite heavily yet the place was busy.
The food choices had something for everyone: hamburgers, hotdogs, Snow Milk (frozen milk shaved fine as snow with ice cream and toppings of your choice), Southeast Asian favorites, pizza and pasta, kebab and shawarma, breakfast fare, rice bowls, poutine (fries slathered with gravy, cheese and bacon), even “soul food” (fried chicken steak, fish and chips, corn dogs, even fried Oreos).
‘Lost bread’
What caught my attention was Lost Bread, a place that serves French toast and milkshakes.
It’s the brainchild of partners Patty Marabut and Emil Ongchuan—both fresh graduates of manufacturing engineering but who wanted to pursue their love of food seriously.
After brainstorming, they concluded that, though there are many breakfast places, most of them serve pancakes but only a few have French toast (something Patty and Emil have a penchant for).
French toast in France is known as pain perdu, literally translated as “lost bread”—thus the name of Patty and Emil’s food venture.
They did not, however, settle for the traditional execution of the dish. Instead they developed playful renditions such as Arctic Banana, or French toast with banana brulee, buko, ube, chocolate ice cream, chocolate syrup and nuts.
And then there’s Cereal Port—French toast with cereal, creamy peanut butter and a bowl of spiced milk.
Their French toasts are made from thick slices of brioche bread. But it’s their milkshakes I found truly interesting.
Two kinds of milkshakes
The Lost Bread milkshakes come in two categories:
Cake Shakes are soft-serve ice-cream-based milkshakes with a cake (waffle, donut or brownie) blended into the mixture. The cake bits give the drink a unique texture.
Their most popular Cake Shake is called the Carnival—soft-serve ice cream, caramel popcorn, vanilla butter cake with a topper of cotton candy.
The other milkshake category is the “18+”—soft-serve ice-cream-based drinks paired with Kahlua, Bailey’s or vodka.
The liquor is served on plastic pipettes. This allows the customer to control how much to add to the milkshake, and an option not to spike the drink.
While lining up (as there literally was a line) I noticed that everyone was ordering for the Campfire—a soft-serve vanilla ice-cream-based milkshake drizzled with chocolate syrup, generously topped with whipped cream, sprinkled with crushed Graham cracker, and capped with a large piece of perfectly toasted marshmallow and a pipette of Kahlua.
Everything worked perfectly well, as the liqueur neutralized the richness of the drink.
When I asked Patty how she wanted her customers to remember Lost Bread, she said, “That while we serve dishes with simple and familiar ingredients, we make it a point to turn them into something unique and revolutionary.”
The long queue of patrons waiting to be served is proof that the clever concoctions have been tickling their imagination and piquing their fancy.
Lost Bread is at StrEat: Maginhawa Food Park, 91 Maginhawa St., UP Village, Quezon City; open Tuesday-Sunday, 5 p.m.-2 a.m.; tel. 0917-8212111.