For a board exam reviewee who’s still dependent on my parents for my allowance, budget-friendly eateries and restaurants are my go-to places. My review center is along Morayta (Nicanor Reyes St.) in Sampaloc, Manila, near FEU. Being near universities, there are many eateries serving meals for as low as P25; however, the food safety is quite questionable. I’ve already tried the P25 meal once and got sick, so I really need to find other places that meals are affordable yet delicious and clean.

After our review class last August 7, my classmates and I were looking for a place to eat dinner along Morayta. It was a rainy day so my classmates were craving for noodles; I’m not a big fan of noodles but I didn’t want to eat alone (Hehe). We saw the sign board of this Taiwanese restaurant and decided to give it a try.

ERSAO is on the 3rd floor of the Adobo Connection building, right across FEU. When we got to the top of the building, we were surprised to see a nice restaurant: airconditioned, couch seats, and free WIFI. They serve noodles, dumplings, rice meals, and milk tea. They even had combo meals of rice meals or noodles with milk tea, ranging from P69 to P129. I was hungry so I chose the rice meal combo of Spicy Squid and Pearl Milk Tea.

—So hungry that I forgot to take a picture of the rice meal, but it looked quite the same as that in the menu:

The service was quite fast; the milk tea was served within a few minutes after we ordered, while the rice meal were served just around 5 mins after. The couch seats were also very comfortable. However, we kept trying to connect to their wifi but we can’t access the Internet. I asked the waitress if they could restart the router, but after sometime we still weren’t able to connect. Maybe it was because of the bad weather.

The serving portions of the spicy squid and rice were bigger than what I expected. The food was also good; the spicy squid was combined with a crunchy green leafy vegetable (I didn’t know what it was but it was fried with the squid) and served with a sweet chili sauce. They even had a variety of spices to chose from if you want additional taste to your food like curry powder, plum powder, seaweed powder, etc.

Overall, our dinner was good! We’ll definitely go back for another ERSAO experience! 🙂