After our Sunday gym session, one of my buddies started talking about bulalo. Not in a casual, maybe-later kind of way, but in the specific, single-minded way you crave something after you’ve just burned through a workout and your body is asking for exactly one thing. There were three of us, including a friend who’d just flown back from Canada, and by the time we were peeling off our gym gloves, the decision had already made itself. Bulalo. Somewhere close. Somewhere good.
We ended up at Cafe Dos, the restaurant inside Ciudad Fernandino Hotel along McArthur Highway in Nancayasan, Urdaneta City. It’s the kind of place that works well for exactly this situation: a group of hungry, slightly sweaty people who want to sit down, order too much food, and not think too hard about it. The alfresco setup gives it a relaxed, unhurried feel, which matters more than people realize after a workout, when the last thing you want is to be rushed through a meal.
What we didn’t expect was that the bulalo itself would turn out to be the smaller surprise of the day. The bigger one came from a wood we’d never heard of being used to smoke meat.
The Bulalo, With a Twist We Didn’t See Coming
Bulalo is usually a known quantity. Beef, corn, vegetables, and a broth that’s been given enough time to become something rich and beefy. Comfort food that doesn’t try to reinvent itself. Cafe Dos’s version had ginger in it, and that one addition changed the whole character of the dish. It wasn’t subtle. The ginger gave the broth a kick that cut through the richness in a way plain bulalo doesn’t usually have, and it was good, the kind of small deviation from the standard recipe that makes you sit up a little after the first spoonful instead of just nodding along.
For a craving that specific, it delivered.
The Smoked Meats, and a Wood We’d Never Heard Of
The smoked meat platter came out like a sampler: chicken, pork, and beef, all smoked and all good. What made the dish memorable wasn’t just the food, though. It was the waiter, who walked us through the process without us even asking: the temperature, how long the meat sits in the smoker, and the wood they use to do it, santol.
None of us had heard of smoking meat with santol before. The usual names that come up are hickory, oak, apple: wood you’d associate with a smokehouse abroad, not a fruit tree that grows all over backyards in the Philippines. It’s a small detail, but it stuck with us. Cafe Dos is owned by the Esguerra family, who also run Ciudad Fernandino Hotel and El Jardin by Ciudad Fernandino, and using something as local and unglamorous as santol wood for their smoking process felt like a genuine choice rather than a gimmick, using what’s actually abundant here instead of importing the idea wholesale.
Rounding out the table was the bagnet kare-kare, which we ordered alongside everything else, plus rice. That was it for sides. No drinks menu deep dive, no dessert. Just bulalo, smoked meats, bagnet kare-kare, and rice, which tells you how confident we were that the mains would carry the meal.
Worth the Portion Size, If You Plan Ahead
The price was reasonable for what we got, but the real thing to know going in is that the servings are big. Big enough that if you’re not careful, you’ll over-order for a group our size. The smarter move, and what I’d tell anyone going for the first time, is to ask the waitstaff how much a serving is meant to feed before you commit. They’ll tell you straight, and it’ll save you from a table full of half-finished plates.
Why I Keep Coming Back
This wasn’t a one-off craving trip for me. Ciudad Fernandino has quietly become my go-to spot whenever relatives or friends from other cities come through Urdaneta. It’s the kind of place where the food does the talking and the setting doesn’t get in the way: good for catching up, good for a proper meal, no complaints from anyone I’ve brought so far.
Sometimes a Sunday gym session just ends in the right lunch. This was one of those times.
