The Callejo Family

Almost every week, we treat our family for weekend. This time Cherry have found this restaurant called Ippon Yari. Cherry chose it because it has a Certificate of Excellence from TripAdvisor.

Sunday morning around 10am we departed in Los Banos and sailed to Santa Rosa, Laguna. It took us more or less an hour to get to our destination. We arrived in Ippon Yari at around 11am.

The good thing is that we arrived there almost an hour ahead of the usual 12 noon lunch time. This gave us the advantage of having to park our car at a good location.

Outside look of Ippon Yari as seen from its parking area

Since Ippon Yari is a Japanese restaurant, of course you can eat there the Japanese way. However for us, we chose to eat the western way -- that is with high tables.

Japanese style tables

One thing I've been wondering is that "Why do those Japanese people prefer the western tables than the eastern ones?" Anyway, the place has a great ambiance with embedded Japanese experiences. Their staff members greeted us in Japanese. A thing that makes the experience genuine.

Western style tables

At this time, we haven't eaten any ordered dish yet, we only eaten the free appetizers which we can say "tasted fair and okay". Before we ate the main dishes, we made sure we took photos of the food and had a groufie pic. One good thing is that we were able to request assistance from their staff members for a group pic.

That obligatory groufie pic

If you will look closer to the groufie pic, you will see that Gohan had this red item beside the foods. The restaurant's manager gave Gohan toys that he can bring with him. We were really surprised for those presents.

Free toys for Gohan

We really have not much idea in Japanese foods. What we know a lot are ramens and so we looked in their menu about ramens. This thing popped up as it was stated in the menu as a best seller. So we did order it.

Be wary of this delicious food for it is good for 2 persons (by Filipino size). But if you have a tummy of a Sumo wrestler, well yeah you can easily devour this yummy noodle soup.

Nagasaki Champon (Tonkotsu-based soup with veggies, squid and kani)

We love eating Makis all the time. Whenever we see maki, we order. That's that. Nothing else to explain here. These makis did not disappoint us. They were really good. We did not regret we ordered 2 servings of these.

California Maki

Since our main plates are of Ramens, it is always compulsory to get some dumplings as side dishes. According also Cherry's researches, Ippon Yari has this highly recommended dumpling called Gyozza. We did order it and it received a unanimous vote of two thumbs ups.

Speaking of "unanimous" while we were eating in the restaurant, we were also watching the Pacquiao-Matthysse bout. Though Pacquiao did not win by Unanimous decision, it was even better, a win by Technical Knock Out.

Gyouzza gave us all a Technical Knock Out.

Gyozza (Fried dumplings)

Dumplings were not that enough for us. We even ordered Makis and this food called Yakitory Morawase.

Yakitori Moriawase (Assorted meat)

Shake Shio Yaki (Grilled Salmon)

Free hot tea

Around 7pm, we were searching for a place to dine in. We parked our car in Vega Center and tried our luck there. The first thing we checked was the newly opened Malaysian Cuisine restaurant behind/beside Starbucks but then the said food store wasn't that inviting.

The next place we tried was the Entablado Cafe. The cafe that is owned by a famous singer Ebe Dancel of Sugarfree, we heard he often go to the said restaurant but that was not the case when we went there. We checked the cafe's menu and we simply thought to ourselves "we were looking for something else".

So, we checked the next door restaurant which is named "Bugong" and when we checked their menu, we instantly decided we are going to eat "Chicken Satay". The first time we tried Chicken Satay was in Tagaytay and since then we loved it more than any of the chicken dishes.

Here we are with our food and drinks with us.

The obligatory groufie pic

Below is the look of Chicken Satay from Bugong. The garnish were not that bad also. Just perfect red-and-green enough for us to have good appetite.

Chicken Satay with Thai rice

Complimentary to our food are these refreshing beverages. We ordered three glasses of 2 kinds.

Thai Chee and Cucumber Lemonade

We also ordered this starter soup just so we could try something new.

Vegetable soup

The great thing about Bugong is that their place have this ambiance about organics and greens. You won't feel like you are in the-fast-lane. Perfect for relaxation while eating.