What goes well with a hot cup of coffee? At this new modern tapsilogan and cafe in the south, their delicious answer is comfort food in forms of breakfast meals, homemade cookies, and warm, pillowy beignets always served hot.
Kapeng Mainit, a new neighborhood coffee shop in the south, is a family-run business which also includes good family friends of Chef Bryan Francisco and his brother, DJ Ron Poe: the celebrity Eigenmann siblings, who the chef shares he already considers as his own brothers. Francisco's first kitchen experience is baking in a Las Vegas establishment, Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery; he then returned to the country and worked on product development for a coffee shop for a while. "It started with the cookies," Francisco shares about the beginnings of his first restaurant. The twentysomething chef was baking cookies from home and selling them during the holiday season, and they sold fast. It was three flavors–chocolate chip, oatmeal, and double chocolate chip–cookies inspired by his pastry stint in Bouchon, and tweaking the recipes to make it distinctly his own. From cookies, he expands the offerings into a full menu of food and drink at Kapeng Mainit.
The coffee here is pretty straightforward and simple — the cafe uses kapeng barako, local coffee from Batangas. All beverages are affordable, too: there's Kapeng Mainit (P50) brewed barako coffee with a strong kick, Kapeng Mainit Special (P105) which sweetens the barako with cinnamon, cocoa, and creme brulee creamer.
There's also Kapeng Malamig (P105), an iced version of Kapeng Mainit Special, and Kapeng Mocha (P110, hot or iced). To pair with your choice of caffeinated kick is a lineup of savory and sweet dishes that are stuff of comfort food: silogs, rice meals, Pinoy breakfast faves, cookies, and doughnuts.
For snacking, Kapeng Mainit offers a bowl of Corn Hash (P95), a treat to munch on as appetizers or to match with your mains. It's a tumble of textures and flavors, combining sweet corn, bits of buttered bacon, popcorn, and quail eggs.
The cafe also makes the snack Spam musubi popular in Hawaii, another country as equally in love with Spam (perhaps even more) as ours. The Spamusubi (P125) here uses a thick slice of caramelized Spam wrapped in nori with your choice of rice: plain, kimchi, or sinigang. You can even transform it into a breakfast musubi or sorts by adding P35 for Bacon and Egg. I enjoyed the Spamusubi with a block of sinigang rice, as every bite was a combination of salt from the meat and a hint of sourness from the morsels of rice cooked in sinigang broth. Kimchi rice, bacon and egg, and Spam was a tasty mix, too. For heavier snacking (or really, it can be your filling meal), Kapeng Mainit also sels sandwiches sided with pico de gallo, salsa verde, and kamote chips; pair your coffee with a Grilled Cheese (P140) and even load it up with either Corned Beef or Tuna (P150)
All mains come at this new restaurant with a cup of Kapeng Mainit, making their meals real value for money, stretching your 200 Pesos: that's a hearty rice meal and a hot cup of strong local coffee at a homey cafe, on a budget that could only get an order of beverage in big-brand (or fancy third wave) coffee shops.
To make the silog presentation a little different (and a little healthier), the chef decided to include poached eggs for their all-day breakfast meals instead of the usual fried or scrambled. And it's not quite the usual poached egg too, as their fresh eggs are made to look like a ball of burrata, or will remind you of a tiny siopao or dumpling as it sits pretty, crowned with tomato salsa, on top of a heaping of rice and ulam. Pleasantly sweet is the homemade Chicken Tocino (P180) of caramelized chicken on sinigang rice served with poached egg, while the Tapa 2.0 (P195) uses sirloin beef tapa that tastes great with the slightly spicy kimichi rice. My favorite silog meal is the most affordable among the mains: a Pork Adobo (P175) using bacon cut pork on a bed of garlic rice. The marinade of the chunks of pork, sweet with just a slight saltiness, reminds me so much of my late grandmother's homey cooking, a pork dish she used to cook often for us that was an absolulte treat to mix with rice.
The same adobo marinade resurfaces as a lipsmacking sauce for the Adobo Fried Chicken (P195) in garlic rice, offering adobo again but now in a crispier chicken form. If you want to splurge–which is really just adding a little more to your P200 budget–a must try is the garlic smothered Shrimp Scampi (P240) on chili butter rice.
After the savories come the desserts that go well with kapeng mainit. And in this tiny cafe in BF Homes, the Beignets (P120/4 pieces) have been their sweet superstars, triangular puffs of French doughnuts with powdered sugar. The inspiration to make beignets for the restaurant, Chef Bryan shares, comes from a film the chef watched when he was younger. No, it isn't the movie Chef of recent where the main character travels to New Orleans to eat the famous French doughnuts, but rather the Disney animation Princess and the Frog, where Tiana serves fresh beignets to her customers.
And just as how in the film the customers can't get enough of the fried fritters, Kapeng Mainit customers have come from different cities and spent long roadtrips to the south just to sink their teeth into fresh beignets. "There are different types of beignets — there's one made with brioche and another with buttermilk. It's so soft and delicate…. it takes so much time and effort," the chef says. It took him four days and nine batches to achieve the consistency of the dough to what it is now.
They also offer two other kinds of beignets, stuffing it with a warm and gooey filling: there's Chocolate Filled Beignets (P150) which is a sure hit as everybody loves chocolate; however, if matcha makes your heart flutter, I highly recommend the Green Tea Filled Beignets (P155) with that slight leafy bitterness I love in my green tea flavored desserts that puts a spin into the sweetness of things.
To nibble on with coffee or to take home are the Bouchon inspired Cookies (P35 each) in five different flavors: chocolate chip, double choco chunk, green tea, oatmeal, and calamansi.
Another comfort food combination is warm cookies served with ice cream, and Kapeng Mainit offers this cookie ala mode treat in two ways. The C3 (P160) is three cookies of choice topped with 2 scoops of vanilla ice cream, while C5 (P290) is, yes, a five cookie version–a good to share treat of five cookies topped with four scoops of ice cream. Cookies are served warm and laid out on a pan, with the ice cream melting quickly for a gooey sweet mess of warm meeting cold that's an absolute treat to lick from your spoon.
Chewy and crispy, the different cookies present delicious combinations of flavors and textures in every generous spoonful with ice cream slowly melting for a creamy, cold finish (my favorite is the calamansi cookie). Just as the cafe's breakfast food proves to be an excellent partner with coffee, their desserts deliciously pair with their trusty kapeng mainit to perk up your dining experience.
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Visit Kapeng Mainit at Lot 3 Block 6 Tropical Avenue (near the BF Casimiro Gate), BF Homes, Paranaque. The cafe is right beside Okiniri No Japanese restaurant. Like Kapeng Mainit on Facebook (/kapengmainit143) and follow on Instagram (@kapeng_mainit).
