Patis Tito Garden Café is located in the City of
San Pablo in the province of
Laguna, about 85 kilometers away from Manila.
Featuring Filipino cuisine in an al fresco garden setting, the main dining room is one large covered patio with coconut tree trunk pillars supporting a high ceiling. Many of the wood cutout details are made by local artisans, and the room is full of a wonderfully eclectic mixture of Filipino and Asian furniture, crafts and art.
The café is owned by Patis and Tito Tesoro, whose portraits adorn one wall of the dining room.
Patis is a well-known fashion designer who specializes in Filipino formal wear using fabrics from natural and handwoven fiber. She was in the café when we had lunch there on Saturday, and she came up to us to introduce herself and chat a bit, but I was too shy to ask for a picture. The rest of the time, she spent puttering around her garden.
Just off the main dining area is an intimate patio with garden furniture and a stone sculpture of an Asian goddess.
At the foot of the statue is a whimsical pond-themed fountain. I'm glad the water wasn't running, else we might not have seen the koi and lotus.
How can one resist a stroll through the garden when the entrance beckons so beguilingly from the dining area?
The meandering paths are an invitation to lose oneself in the gardens of Patis Tito Garden Café.
More Asian stone statues can be discovered in the garden. I especially love this moss-covered one.
When walking around Patis Tito Garden Café, it is important to look down too. The fine feather details of this rooster mosaic is just amazing.
Tito and Patis Tesoro are bird lovers too, and the garden has plenty of large cages with a variety of tropical birds. They had several kinds of pheasant, which I'd never seen before, and I found the bold, graphic coloring of this
silver pheasant particularly striking.
There are several buildings at the back of the garden which are off-limits to guests. Some are obviously storage and work rooms, but this lovely house with woodcut details is probably the apartment of some of the Tesoro's live-in staff.
Tito and Patis Tesoro also have their own apartment within the compound, in a house built in a traditional Filipino architectural style. The main living quarters are on the second floor, and the first floor serves as a storage area and provides much-needed air circulation in this tropical country. The first floor is now a store which sells Asian and Filipino jewelry, fabrics and one-of-a-kind treasures.
And don't worry, I haven't forgotten about the food—it's the reason why we went to Patis Tito Garden Café, after all. Come back tomorrow for a vision (wish I could say "taste" instead!) of our delectable meal.
"Alive without breath,
As cold as death;
"Cats are a mysterious kind of folk."
"I'd rather be a big fish in a specialized pond than a little, little fish in a more generalized big pond."
"Cats have it all—admiration, an endless sleep,
"A closed mouth catches no flies."
Spotted near the waiting area of the Zoobic Safari. Cousins, indeed. Both were absolutely determined to ignore me.
This is the closest I ever want to get to those big, sharp claws and teeth.
When these concrete animals appeared in front of a house in our neighborhood back in 1974, all the children—me included—were absolutely delighted. None of us thought they were kitschy at all. Almost 40 years later, they're still around, but the elephant has lost its trunk, the horse has a damaged tummy, and the lion's mane has started falling off. The poor things.
Well, okay, goats too. The rocks are hazardous to ships, and the goats are hazardous to drivers. The local government of Burgos ought to put goat crossing signs in their stretch of the Pan-Philippine Highway.
My husband and I had no plans of stopping in the town of San Juan while we were in the province of La Union, but a small cluster of brick buildings along the highway caught my eye on our way to Bacnotan and I requested that we stop for a few minutes. The cluster turned out to be the town center of San Juan, which, like many Spanish-era towns in the Philippines, are laid out with the town hall and church around a central plaza and park. "Presidencia" seems to be used quite commonly to refer to the town hall, though I have to admit that this is the first time this city-bred girl learned that tidbit. I find San Juan's wood and brick presidencia lovely.
No one knows the exact date of the founding of San Juan; the only sure fact is that it was already a town when the province of La Union was created in 1850. History has not been gentle to San Juan, which was razed to the ground by a fire during the 1896 Philippine Revolution, and devastated during World War II. Again, I cannot find much information about the church. After the 1896 fire, the church was rebuilt in 1902, and my guess is that the current church still has parts from that 1902 structure.
The church and the town are named after San Juan Bautista (Saint John the Baptist), and the scene of John baptizing Jesus in the Jordan River is painted on the church's ceiling.
A small Marian grotto between the church and the rectory is also a memorial to a 19th century Ilokano poet named Mariano A. Gaerlan. 
The town of San Juan lies on the western coast of Luzon and is best known for its earthenware pottery and its waves—waves strong enough for surfing (though not big wave surfing) especially from July to March. So it is not surprising that the coastline is depicted on the mural of the open-air stage in the town plaza. Also in the mural is the ruins of the town's baluarte or watchtower, which can still be seen at the seaside though we weren't able to visit it. The park seems to double as pasture for goats too. LUZON ROAD TRIP SERIES #4
The dogs of the small villages around the area use the beaches of Laiya and Hugom in San Juan, Batangas as their early morning play and exercise grounds. When resort guests wake up and start arriving on the beach, they head back home.
