Iloilo City's La Paz Public Market: Netong's Batchoy & Madge Café

The Philippines has a lot of popular merienda dishes and one of them is 'batchoy', a hot broth with noodles and a lot of other flavorful ingredients which I will enumerate later while salivating.😋

While I was growing up, I was never a fan of this dish because nobody at home seemed interested in dragging me to a 'batchoyan', the common name of a restaurant that serves this dish.  That's why batchoy never became a comfort food.😆

But over the years, whenever I got caught in a food arcade in Bacolod City where I didn't have any option but 'batchoy', I ended up slurping a bowl.

(Netong's is full)

In the menus and names of restaurants serving this dish, the words 'La Paz' always precede 'batchoy' because that's where this dish originated and these restaurants always claimed that their recipe followed the original one invented at La Paz, a district in Iloilo City, an old charming city in the middle part of the Philippines.

(Instagrammable Netong carrying 

a bowl of hot batchoy)

So, when my sister and I were in Iloilo City during the Dinagyang Festival, we made sure we got to slurp the real batchoy at the place where it was invented: the La Paz public market!😀

Right in the middle of the La Paz public market is Netong's, a batchoyan whose owner's great grandfather was said to have invented it by putting innards, noodles and flavorings into a hot broth from beef stock. Actually, it's more complicated than that.

                        (My batchoy and soda)

The real batchoy we were served at Netong's (the nickname of Leonito, the founder) was made of beef broth with bones (just like bulalo🐂) that has been cooked over low fire for hours, extracting the beef flavor, and added with fermented shrimp paste (bago-ong), with strands of egg noodles (locally known as miki) and slices of liver, pork, innards and cholesterol-high bone marrow, and topped with fried garlic, scallions and, my favorite topping, crushed chicharon!☝You can sprinkle black pepper or soy sauce, depending on your taste, and you can also have raw egg cracked into it for added taste and nutrition. 🐓

The feel of bits of crushed chicharon (deep-fried pig skin) in my mouth dancing in a spoonful of hot, flavorful broth mixed with innards was a lot different from the ones I tasted outside Iloilo City. This one was the real - the authentic - Batchoy!

(Outside the restaurant, they were 

cooking these innards for another dish)

At Netong's, you can pair the batchoy with puto, the kind that tastes creamier because it is made with coconut milk, although, for me, I'd rather have my batchoy with my favorite soda.

After batchoy, we wanted to neutralize the beefy flavor left in our mouths with coffee and dessert, and since we were already at La Paz public market, we headed to Madge Café, the market's famous and unique coffee shop.

As I ordered my go-to coffee drink of iced cafe mocha, the Madge Café waitress recommended cake to pair with it, and what do you know, she offered chocolate cake from Calea! Calea is a popular cake shop in Bacolod City and its popularity (and obviously chocolate cake) has crossed the Iloilo Strait! So we got a slice! 

But when she served us the chocolate cake, I had to tell her that we were from Bacolod City and that the best chocolate cake wasn't Calea's nor Felicia's chocolate cakes. It was Bar 21's! Yes, if you're in Bacolod City, make sure you visit Bar 21 and have a taste of their moist, chocolate cake with custard filling. 

Calea's chocolate cake and 

Madge Café's iced cafe mocha)

Madge Café, named after Magdalena, the wife of the original owner, has been there since 1951, and decades of serving good coffee inside an unassuming place right in the middle of a public market have turned it into an institution, attracting locals as well as tourists.

Well, after tasting Netong's, reputedly the best batchoy, not only in Iloilo City but everywhere else, my palate can now measure other people's batchoy version. 😄

So, if you're visiting Iloilo City soon, I highly recommend you drop by the La Paz public market to discover a real batchoyan🍲 and hang out at the city's most famous coffee shop☕.