Makilala — Restaurant in Toronto

Finally a Filipino restaurant at the heart of downtown.

Atmosphere- Amazing Right when you enter the restaurant you immediately feel transported to the Philippines. Karaoke is running and available for patrons to participate in. All the paraphernalia lends well to the authenticity of the restaurant

Service- Great Our server was friendly and was able to explain the menu in detail. Some confusion when we were getting our food and it got delivered to another table until we flagged the person. Considering that the food is supposed to be eaten family style. Would have preferred to have everything arrive simultaneously rather than in parts. So everything can be enjoyed together without the food cooling.

Food- Good and authentic however slightly underwhelming. Flavour profile is I would say very typical for Filipino dishes. It’s like going to your Filipino neighbours for dinner. However for family style the portion was slightly small especially for the price point.

We ordered the kare kare oxtail. Lechon Kawali and fried lumpia.

Kare-Kare $27 The meat off the ox tail was good but the amount of meat was small. I think this would benefit with additional meat cuts. Amazing cook on the veggies with the green beans knotted in a cute way. The sauce was missing a bit of flavour but maybe I’m just used to my Kare Kare with more of a peanuty flavour and thicker sauce. The bagoong was amazing tho

Lechon Kawali $25 Great cook with nice and crispy skin. Presentation needs maybe some sort of veggie or Atchara and the amount is slightly small. The sauce is more like a bottle of Mang Tomas

Fried Lumpia $15 -Authentic flavours of the mince meat on the inside of the fried wrapper. The rolls themselves were skinny. Came with 4 long rolls. I think this can be modified to 8 smaller rolls for ease of sharing. The sauce seemed like a sweet and sour sauce.

TLDR: convenient location for Filipino food. Great atmosphere and environment. Food flavour is authentic however the portion size is smaller considering the family style eating.

I think they’re still fine tuning the menu. Will consider revisiting in the future and trying out the other items...

I'd love to give some constructive feedback because I want this place to do well and although my friend and I enjoyed our time here, there were a few things that could've gone smoother.

Pros - The food tasted good but we were more wowed by their cocktails. Very well done and unique. The ambience was lovely and I got to storytell a lot about the environment to my friend as it reminded me a lot about home. The servers were kind and nice albeit I think they could've been more efficient. We had to wait for food for quite a while so we were given an free serving of jasmine rice for our troubles.

Cons - I think the portion sizes could've been a bit bigger. Pinoy dishes are made to be shared so you do end up having to order quite a bit of food and can easily hit quite an expensive number just for 2 people. The picture I provided came up to 170cad+ with 2 cocktails and a Halo-Halo. The Halo-Halo should be a bigger portion with a bigger bowl to allow for an easier mixing experience. It's quite an expensive dessert to share when it's just a few bites and is used for birthday celebrations. My biggest irk sadly was that the dishes came out slow. We came around 5:30pm and it was decently full but became busier later. Nevertheless, dishes started coming out with too much time in between which made the other dishes cold for us because we wanted to experience all the food in one go. It also took them 30m to come out with the dessert as I had to keep reminding them frequently about it, even though I tried to prepare for it and inform them early before we got our food since we had to rush out and catch a show (they were possibly slammed at this point).

Overall a great higher end Pinoy restaurant that is much needed at the heart of downtown. We had a good time and looking forward to coming back to a...

I came here with two others and we really wanted to like this place, especially when the reviews and ratings are overall high. However a few things just really did not meet expectations and made our experience mediocre.

The food and price: Like others have said, food was decent. We had lumpia shanghai (my favourite), Kare-Kare, and Lechon Kawali. They were yummy but in our opinion, extremely overpriced. The portions were tiny. The rice that came with some of these dishes were 1/2 of what you’d normally get in a regular rice bowl. $26 for the Kare-Kare with Kawali was so expensive, considering how small the stew actually came in. Pretty disappointing. ☹️

The service: Staff were very nice, but working in such a rush. We got the wrong food delivered to our table a few times throughout the night (seemed like they were mixing up our table with the one next to ours). Also the moment we paused on eating and were planning to leave, I had half a lumpia left on a plate and was going to finish that but they already took it away before I’d noticed. The table was cleared way too abruptly.

The atmosphere: While I enjoy karaoke and get that it is interesting and fun as a concept for the overall Filipino restaurant dining experience, it was INSANELY loud the whole night. I guess we didn’t expect the volume to be what it was. We were screaming at the top of our lungs just to talk and the staff were also struggling to communicate over the super loud volume and had to yell back and forth with us. I guess it’d have been fine if diners were to just go and focus on eating rather than having conversations.

Overall it was an alright dining experience, but it was very difficult to love...