GETTING OVER THE FACT THAT KAM’S ROAST HAS NO ROAST GOOSE

The standouts for me were the century egg and the ‘toro’ char siu

“H ow wonderful! I haven’t had roast goose in a while!” said my wife in anticipation, as we took the escalator to Kam’s Roast Goose Restaurant, which does not serve roast goose.

Understandably, the Philippine branch of Kam’s that opened recently at Megamall’s Fashion Hall is reluctant to advertise the fact that it sells everything but its core product.

The Philippines could be a place where hopes are dashed and dreams are shattered. It is also where the written law is never what is executed.

Take our roads, for example. It is almost impossible to drive a route you have never driven before without being flagged by a policeman (actually, one of the different agencies who are allowed to stop you and take your license)—not because you have run a red light or are running at 60 kph in a residential neighborhood, but because the roads are so poorly sign-posted, or the injunction to get onto a specific lane comes after the double yellow line.

As the kind woman who returned my license told me with a shrug: It’s the end of the month. They need to meet their quotas.

We walk away from these situations with an attempt to always look on the bright side of life: There are worse quotas to be on the wrong side of.

There is a lot of hearsay, but no official explanation of why there is no roast goose at Kam’s.

The explanation that the im- portation of geese is not allowed is undermined somewhat by the copious quantities that are served daily at Eight Treasures, another Hong Kong-style roast restaurant in the unlikely location of the Petron station on the northbound lane of Edsa, just outside the gate of Dasmariñas Village.

The entrance to the service station is marked by a big Audi in a glass cube of some sort; then you go past the pumps and drive to the far end.

Where there would normally be smelly restrooms, an unassuming little restaurant serves up great big slabs of roast goose, roast duck, and char siu (the local pronunciation is “cha- sio”).

You can have it over rice at one of the tables in the tiny restaurant. Most of the customers lining up here are getting it to go: probably to eat in their mansions at Dasmariñas or Forbes Park, given the plutocratic prices this restaurant charges.

Kam’s is in a slightly more civilized place. It’s actually more civilized than its original branch in Hong Kong (yes, it’s another franchise), which is a stone’s throw away from Yung Kee, arguably the most famous roast goose restaurant in the world.

But there’s always a queue at Kam’s, so we usually end up at Yung Kee—this is an authentic Hong Kong experience, down to the feeling of having been thoroughly fleeced. (The roast goose is actually reasonable enough, but should you dare have anything else, even a pot of tea, prepare to pay through the nose.)

My favorite roast goose restaurant is Sham Cheng Yue Kee, out in the New Territories. Most taxi drivers either don’t know it or don’t want to go there, and you should expect to pay about HK$250 for the trip.

But this place serves the best roast goose in the world.

Quite pleasant

As I never tire of telling people, Megamall is the largest mall in the Philippines: not Mall of Asia, not SM City, though these seem to go on forever.

Megamall wins in terms of floor area, which it has achieved at the expense of parking. Let it not be said that they paved paradise and put in a parking lot, because they’ve paved the parking lot and put in, well, Kam’s Roast Goose with no goose.

Once you get over the fact that they have no goose, though, it’s actually quite pleasant. It has the surreal feeling of being in an actual Chinese restaurant, complete with cranky Cantonese chef, Chinese-Filipino families assembling for some occasion, while opening out onto the mall.

They have roast duck, which I do understand is another animal, but it’s not bad.

The standouts for me were the century egg and the “toro” char siu—the latter is just a fancy way of saying it’s the soft, fatty bit at the side. (Hai Shin Lou does a good char siu, but you have to do a bit of armtwisting to get that particular cut. Xiu is capable of