In the August issue of British Esquire, food journalist Tom Parker Bowles writes about how a trip to the Philippines, meeting its people and partaking of its culinary offerings, changed his preconceived notions of Manila.

Before his visit, Bowles’ image of the capital—supplied by well-meaning friends and acquaintances—were unsavory at best. More than once he was asked if he was a sex tourist; otherwise, why come to Manila?

The son of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, feasted on local delicacies such as sisig, adobo, sinigang, kare-kare and, yes, balut, on his visit early this year. (The article comes with a recipe for sisig and adobo.) He left transformed.

“Yes, it’s a city with a pockmarked face and a horrible limp, a place of erroneous preconceptions,” he writes. “But it has a heart of gold. Like the kind of beauty that has fallen on hard times… Overlooked and underappreciated, it’s the plucky survivor. You just have to look beyond the obvious, scratch away the generalizations and long-held cant.”