Cebu — Restaurant in West Chicago Township

After hearing for this new restaurant, I was eagerly anticipating it's arrival on the Chicago food scene, especially since this place represented the style of Filipino cooking my family immigrated from. Overall, some dishes were good, some just fell flat. I'm not sure if we just happened to get some off dishes for the night but, even so, that's no excuse. First, I'll start off by saying that I love the space. The staff was friendly and the service was great. I came with a group of friends, some Filipino, some not. Some of the dishes we wanted to try out were already sold out. So maybe those were knock out dishes that might have changed our experience. We ordered some appetizers (lumpia, pork skewers, pandesal (bread), and a salad with duck egg). Unfortunately, the lumpia, which is like a Filipino eggroll was crispy on the top and a bit soggy on the bottom. That usually means it was sitting too long to cool off. The rest of the apps were good. As for main dishes, we ordered the Sisig and that was a bit disappointing. It's supposed to be served searing hot (imagine a steak fajita platter) topped with an egg. It was just warm and the texture was a bit off. It didn't have the flavorful meat or crunch you would expect with it. The chicken adobo was ok. I think they added coconut milk to it which I think made it a little more creamier and lost the punch that you'd expect in flavor of soy sauce, vinegar, and garlic. The chicken was cooked well though. The thing that disappointed us the most was the Pork Belly. I've read other reviews and people seems to love it. What makes pork belly amazing is the crackling crunch of the skin, and that fat of the pork melts into the meat, so it's really juicy and flavorful. Our was the opposite. The meat was dry and the skin was rubbery. We immediate knew it was not good when we tried to cut into the skin and it felt like cutting rubber. The dinner ended on a high note in which we all enjoy Halo-Halo (a dessert worth coming for). For those who don't know anything about Filipino food, they'll walk away thinking it was a good meal. For someone like me who is open to Filipino culinary fusions, making a twist on classic dishes, etc....the entrees we had fell flat. I did make plans with another group of friends to check this place out, so I'm giving it another shot. I hope it's better the second...

Very nice place. Good food, good people, good facility, just all-around good. We even got free street parking, which is something to note these days in the city of Chicago. We were a small party (just three), but we ate "family style", so I got to try a few dishes. Everything was excellent. We got a plate of Lumpia to start and liked them so much we got a second round. Probably our second-favorite dish was the "Adobo Chicken", but seriously, everything was very good. And the service was excellent too, attentive and informed. We were there at an off time (Tuesday late, we closed the place but didn't feel like they were pushing us to finish at all) , and the place was not crowded, disturbingly so in fact. It did feel like they could have gotten backed-up at a busier time, but I can't really be positive. If there's something to note, the menu is relatively brief and really is Filipino top to bottom. Do yourself a favor and look it over before you go, If you have a "non-adventurous" eater in your group, a kid, for instance, the "Chorizo Sliders (a plate of three small burgers with truly top-rank fries (if you like your fries crispy, and I do)) will probably keep them happy. Watch out if you don't want pork though, as this is definitely an "everything but the oink" kind of place. And the drinks were good also. We stuck with "beer and cocktails". Wine would have been fine I'm sure, and they have a decent (though short) list, but the food seemed to guide us otherwise. And the cocktails were quite interesting too (only a couple of beers, but that isn't a focus for them). The desert (we shared one "Cranky Cookies Sandwich") was really, really good too. I don't know if this is true of Philippine places in general, this was my first time with the cuisine, but I was surprised at the variety and playful inventiveness on display for the sweets. Because of where we were seated, we got to watch the staff "assemble" the deserts, and it was quite a process. Definitely, go if you can and are at all interested it trying what they have on offer. This is absolutely a place that deserves...

Fairly underwhelming and frustrating experience. I contacted them two weeks in advance to make a reservation for a party of 8, as well as confirmed my reservation the day before via their text messaging service. However, when we showed up they only had us down for 4 people. They end up squeezing us into an inappropriately small booth/table set up and it took another 15/20 minutes to even get the appropriate amount of chairs for everyone. Probably another 10/15 minutes to get the right number of cups for water. We ordered two pitchers of sangria to start, they only bring 6 cups. My buddy orders a beer...it never comes. Really just miss after miss.

In terms of the food, everything was mostly ok. Pork skewers were a bit on the dry side, empanadas were decent, but the chorizo sliders were pretty good. Of course the only thing on the menu I really wanted (the cebu lechon) they were out of, which seemed silly since they only serve it on Fridays and Saturdays for dinner and our reservation was around 7pm on a Friday.

Overall, I probably won't be coming back. I understand places are getting back into the swing of things now that capacity restrictions are lifting, but after speaking with some other friends that have also been this seems to be par for the course for...