All over Cebu, you’ll find places called karenderias — local home-style diners that remind me a bit of Kyoto’s obanzai restaurants. Rows of large pots sit on the counter. You lift each lid, peer inside, and order whatever looks good by the plate. Eat in or take out — and if you take out soup, they’ll pour it into a plastic bag without a second thought. 😄

Vegetable dishes run about 20 pesos a plate. Add meat or fish and prices go up to around 50 pesos. Rice is always available. I went back to one of my favorites recently after a long gap and was a little shocked to find prices had gone up — inflation is real everywhere.

I can’t fully decode every item on the menu yet, but as a rough guide: the right side of the board is usually meat and fish.

My go-to order is a stir-fry of pumpkin and eggplant with a little pork, plus sinigang — a Cebu classic made with tamarind, giving it a distinctive sour flavor. Add a bowl of rice and the whole meal costs around 40 pesos. Eating mostly vegetables here is wonderfully affordable.

On days when I want meat, I’ll go for something like braised pork with a vegetable soup that almost always contains moringa leaves — a superfood you’ll find in supplement aisles worldwide, here just quietly floating in your soup bowl. Might as well get it the natural way.

One day I found simmered fish. In Cebu, pork and chicken are everywhere, but fish is less common — and simmered fish even rarer. Most fish here gets deep-fried, so finding it braised felt like a small personal victory.

Going to a karenderia with a friend doubles the menu — you each order different things and share. The dish bottom-left in the photo below was one of the most surprising things I’ve eaten in Cebu: pig’s blood soup. The look of it is confronting, I won’t lie. But the flavor? Genuinely delicious. Rich, iron-y, like really good liver. If you like offal, you’d love this. Filipinos use every part of the pig — respectfully, and deliciously.

At another karenderia — this one attached to a market, which always raises my hopes — I ordered braised liver that was absolutely perfect. Light broth, tender liver, clean flavor. I asked the cook how she made it. “Just soy sauce and sugar,” she said.

…Of course it was.

The karenderia is where local Cebu life happens at mealtimes. If you’re visiting Cebu, skip the tourist restaurants at least once and find a karenderia. Point at things that look good, pay almost nothing, and eat very well.