Purple Yam

The menu calls this tocino, but there's more to it than that.

This pan-Asian restaurant emphasizes the cuisine of the Philippines, and indeed, elsewhere tocino is sometimes called Filipino bacon. Purple Yam's rendition ($11.50) is prepared from strips of pork cured with sugar and achuete, more often spelled achiote, the source of the colorant annatto; it has a reddish tinge, and it's sweet. Above, it's served with fried rice, or sinangag, and egg, or itlog, in a combo — TOcino, SInangag, itLOG — that's commonly rendered as tosilog.

On breakfast menus at other Filipino restaurants, you're likely also to see tapsilog, with thin-sliced beef, and longsilog, with sausage. Purple Yam typically deploys garlic fried rice for this dish; on request, they subbed in bagoong (buh-Gong) fried rice, flavored with fermented shrimp. You'll notice it, but if you've had belancan, you won't be bowled over.

For dessert, pandan leche flan ($6), accompanied by strips of macapuno, was very firm and full-bodied, but its delicate herbal notes were buried under the caramelization. That can happen with pandan, even in the innocuous company of coconut milk and palm sugar.

Purple Yam
1314 Cortelyou Rd. (Argyle-Rugby Rds.), Ditmas Park, Brooklyn
718-940-8188
www.PurpleYamNYC.com

Comments

[Eric]

$11.50 for tosilog?! Dios ko po!!!