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.
"The Bermuda Triangle got tired of warm weather. It moved to Alaska. Now Santa Claus is missing."
The pavilions of The Blue Leaf in Taguig City open to a garden which can be used as an extension area for events held in the pavilions. Not recommended during the middle of the day during summer, nor for our monsoon season. The white building in the background belongs to Accenture.
I spent the last three days at Betania Retreat House, run by the Congregation of the Religious of the Virgin Mary, in Tagaytay City in the province of Cavite. Three days with no internet, no cellphone, and no gadgets (I took this photo when our retreat group arrived, then put away the camera too). Three days of meditation, contemplation and prayer. I hope they will be enough to get me through another year with patience, serenity, and grace.
The house across ours has been empty for about half a year now. It was supposedly bought by a developer who was going to build row houses, but nothing has been done yet and we have not even seen a shadow of the new owner. In the meantime, the trees, vines and grass have so grown unchecked that the house can hardly be seen anymore.
The detailed ornamentation of the pavilions in the Chinese Garden of the Rizal Park is amazing. Tiles, woodwork and painting—I cannot even begin to imagine how long it took to finish each structure.
The bench of the octopi installation is under a large tree with no lights, so I only took a photo of the female octopus. I know it's a "she" because of her curvy, queenly crown; the crown of the male octopus is pointy and kingly. 
The giraffes are long, thin, delicate, and spread out on a wide expanse of lawn, so I decided to focus on the gracefully bending neck and delicate legs. Yes, they're wearing sneakers and crochet lace knee supports.
At Plet Bolipata-Borlongan's imagiNATION: Elephants are sturdy and can easily handle a teenager hanging onto them while carrying the rest of the gang.
In her notes for imagiNATION, artist Plet Bolipata-Borlongan says that tigers, lions, and other big cats are fierce so she conceptualized the piece with the bathtub bench between their jaws.
And yes, those benches are very comfortable, as my husband can attest.
At Plet Bolipata-Borlongan's imagiNATION exhibit, the kangaroos wait in expectation for someone to sit on the bathtub bench they are carrying in their arms before hopping off to a fantasy land somewhere.
Welcome to Plet Bolipata-Borlongan's imagiNATION exhibit at the Ateneo de Manila University, where benches similar to yesterday's bathtub loveseat now grace the gardens, flanked by pairs of lacy metal animals accented by crochet and painted soda cans. Plet's wonderland (installed earlier in the year at the Bonifacio Global City), however, was inspired by a serious occurrence: the calamitous floods that the Philippines experiences several times a year because of typhoons. From the artist's notes:
Cafe Juanita (see the previous two posts) is located in a converted house in Barangay Kapitolyo in Pasig City. To maximize the space for customers, the small garden was roofed over and enclosed. To retain the feeling of a garden, however, the space was filled with hanging and potted plants, and what looks like old window grills were attached to the bare concrete wall. Buddha also meditates in the room—on a drum this time—watched over by six colorful macaws.
Chef Gene Gonzalez's Café Ysabel in San Juan City is a cozy restaurant located in a restored 1927 house with romantic, old fountains and ponds in the garden.
The mall SM City North EDSA has a waterfall flowing from its Sky Garden. Too bad no one's allowed anywhere near it.
