Max's Restaurant

This week, Ken and I embarked upon a culinary adventure of the Filipino variety.  Instead of heading home for an ordinary dinner of toaster chicken, steamed veggies and a bagel, on a whim we went to Max's Restaurant at Dufferin and Steeles.

I had walked past Max's one time, on my way to another store in the same strip mall.  All the posters in the window are written in Tagalog.  My inclination would be to stay away from a restaurant with only non-English promotional materials (it seems a little inaccessible), but some of the Filipino guys he works with had told Ken that Max's is really great and that we should try it.

We spent a long time reading the menu.  It provided ample English descriptions of all the dishes, and our friendly waitress was happy to answer our questions.  I decided that since I was there I may as well try something unfamiliar, so I went with something... I can't remember the name of it, actually.  It looks like the picture next to Pancit Lumpia on the menu page.  Ken ordered stewed chicken.

We weren't sure what to expect.  My biggest fear was that the food would be very spicy.  I am not a fan of hot peppers.  As it turns out, our meal erred on the side of being bland.  Ken's stewed chicken with rice was served in a coconut-milk based sauce that was quite plain, although not bad at all.  It was a nice, homemade-tasting dinner.

My Pancit Lumpia, or whatever it was, was slightly more exciting.  It was a plate of thick glass noodles (very slippery) in a fishy sauce, topped with pork, shrimp, and egg.  Ken took one fishy, slippery bite, and said no thanks to this dish.  I could handle eating it, so I did.  However, I did avoid the rings of what looked like calamari, having just listened to This American Life's podcast on pork bung being used as fake calamari.  I mean, given that pork was listed as an ingredient, and calamari was conspicuously absent...  Draw your own conclusions.

While I was slurping my fishy noodles, Ken sampled the red sauce in a glass bottle on the table, which turned out to be banana ketchup. (Not the Max's house brand, which as you can see in the link is only available in Manila.  We had to make do with some other brand.)  His feedback on the sauce was that it was very sweet, and tasted kind of like the red sauce that Chinese restaurants give you with your order of deep-fried chicken balls.

Meanwhile, at another table, some lucky kids were getting Halo-Halo Specials for dessert.  The waiter caught us gawking, and tried to talk us into trying one, but we had had enough adventure food for one evening.

Overall the restaurant was very nice (clean as a whistle, helpful wait-staff, fresh food), but I wouldn't make a point of going back.  I just didn't fall in love with the flavours.