I’m looking back at my calendar for November 2024 and it is primarily filled with solid work days. I basically did six weeks in four weeks between the end of October and end of November. So in this post, I’ll just give a shoutout to two favourite restaurants my boss treated me to on the odd evening I finished early. 😉

The first one is Miyabi, a Japanese restaurant with a beautiful indoor/outdoor primary dining room.

This is my usual order, with mixed tempura that features ginormous sweet shrimp, two octopus nigiri, and then a roll that has fresh and spicy tuna WITHOUT CHEESE. Of course, I have a Sapporo beer to wash it all down. All of this with a generous tip is around 600 pesos.

Alma isn’t usually a proper snuggler, but she likes to touch me.

Dodger is a bit more cuddly and will sit on my feet if I’m getting up and moving around too much.

The other restaurant I went to is Little India, which moved from a very inconvenient location deep in centro to one further north that I can easily bus to. The food is delicious. I always get the thali, which is a plate with several different dishes. Not featured is my starter, pakora, which are deep-fried garbanzo flour and onion fritters that I promised myself I’d try making at home.

My tolerance for heat continues to grow. When I first visited Little India in its initial location, I had beef vindaloo (about 5 o’clock in the photo below) and struggled to finish it as it was so hot. I left all of the gravy. Fast forward to this visit and I did not find the vindaloo to be unbearably hot and I had all the gravy. This wasn’t just a one-off, I have a lot of other examples, like the quantity of fresh habanero sauce that went on my quesadillas the morning I wrote this post. Not being afraid of heat now is such an opening into a new culinary frontier.