Sunburst: Filling but not satisfying

y Mom is not the adventurous type especially when it comes to food. She tends to stubbornly stick to her favorite dining places whenever we go out for our Sunday lunches, despite repeated cajolings from my Dad and I for us to try something new. She sees it as an ultimate waste of money to spend on food that she doesn't like.

This Sunday, she caved in to my Dad's persuasions to try the Sunburst restaurant at Robinson's Place. He's been wanting to try it out for sometime.

So we went there (the place was still empty at 10:30-ish Sunday morning) sat down on cushioned seats and took our time ordering.

My parents settled for Crispy Pata, a Filipino dish of fried pork feet (very cholesterol-rich but we don't eat meat often so fatty foods once in a while should be ok). It looked tasty enough on the picture plastered on a streamer outside the restaurant's door. Since Sunburst's specialty is their fried chicken (ala Jollibee) I ordered some of those, too.

There's no other way to say this in a nice way, so I'll go ahead and say it. We were terribly disappointed with both the pata and the fried chicken. The pata - one order of which is good for 3 to 4 persons - was almost rock hard. To bite it was like trying to bite granite. My Mom, with her false teeth, found it an arduous task. It tasted bland as well. Hard, bland and dry. That's how I would describe their pata. I can't help but compare it to Lab-as Restaurant's, which serves up one of the best patas in the city, and the now defunct Imay's, which used to be the restaurant below Check-Inn Pension House. Their crispy patas are really crispy on the outside yet juicy inside, with that sticky feeling of pork fat swirling inside your mouth.

As for their fried chicken, I don't see what made it their specialty. The batter coating their chicken was also a little hard to bite. Jollibee's and Chowking's Chinese-Style Fried Chicken taste better.

My Mom was silent and sulking a bit throughout the meal. It was her way of silently telling us "I told you so." My parents ate most of the chicken while I forced myself to eat some of the pata.

With most of the pata untouched, we had it bagged to take home with us. As we walked out of the restaurant, my Dad whispered to me that he wasn't going back there. "Nothing special here," he said. Me too, I thought. I was full, but not satisfied. There is a huge difference between those two words.

At least our two dogs were quite happy with the treats we brought home for them!