braised pork belly with either dried vegetables or yams. you can't go wrong with either

ping's seafood or oriental seafood garden are both good choices. at ping's, try the fried smelt. at oriental seafood, the crab served on fried noodles and crispy garlic

For Filipino food, I like Cendrillon better, especially their merienda (snacks). Tried kuma-inn some time back and wasn't really impressed. I think we had some pork bbq and they were really dry.

I used to like Alta very much. In fact, i'd often bring guests from out of town there; however, i've had a bad experience very recently. They seated us upstairs in the back room where they had leaky walls. The table next to us bore the brunt of the leak and had to be relocated elsewhere

Although the food was still good, our waiter was just plain awful. He forgot our order, gave us a lot of lip and to top it off, gave us the wrong bill!! I had brought a guest from out of town and was really embarrassed.

Fortunately, there are tons of great restaurants in NYC where the service doesn't suck. I don't plan to go back to this one again.