logo
$5 skewers and a ‘secret' menu: Your cheat sheet to the city's latest Filipino restaurant

$5 skewers and a ‘secret' menu: Your cheat sheet to the city's latest Filipino restaurant

The Age05-05-2025

Eating out Just open
After success with pop-ups, an up-and-coming chef is spotlighting real-deal Filipino flavours at his new spot off Smith Street in Fitzroy. It's all about hearty brunch, snacky night menus and wallet-friendly prices.
For the last few years, Filipino chef Fhred Batalona has been sharing the food of his homeland through pop-ups (including at the now-closed Epocha) and his catering business Barangay, while working at venues including Richmond's Bar Pigalle (now-closed) and Orlo in Collingwood. In mid-April, he went bricks and mortar, opening Palay in Fitzroy.
Who's behind it?
Batalona has opened Palay with Ralph Libo-on and Michael Mabuti, who are involved with some of Melbourne's favourite Filipino venues including Askal and Kariton Sorbetes.
What should I eat?
'One thing that's happening with the Filipino [food] movement is that we're trying to fuse it so much,' says Batalona. 'But the dining culture is changing ... People are now looking for something a bit more just true and authentic.'
That's what he's aiming for at Palay.
The star of the brunch menu is arroz caldo, a nourishing Filipino chicken rice porridge that reminds Batalona of home. In place of the traditional glutinous rice, Filipino head chef John Salang uses arborio, leaning into his experience cooking Italian food. It's flavoured with a heady hit of ginger and fish sauce before the warming bowl is topped with boiled eggs, fried garlic and chives.
From 5pm, a Filipino 'tapas' menu kicks in. Sydney rock oysters are dressed with an adobo sauce that 'slaps you in the face'. Sizzling sisig combines pig's ear, cheek and belly into an unctuous dish that gets extra smoky from being fired by the grill, then the wok.
What if I'm vegan?
From sisig to lechon (suckling pig), many popular Filipino foods are meaty. But Palay has a 'secret' vegan menu to cater to plant-based fans. The above-mentioned arroz caldo uses vegan chicken stock and adobo fried tofu can be added. And instead of serving Filipino liver spread with the house-baked pandesal (quintessentially Filipino bread rolls), the vegan alternative is an umami-rich mushroom paste.
How much does it cost?
'We want people to be able to come back,' says Batalona, so currently nothing on the menu's over $30. And if you're on a budget, you could just pop in for a few skewers: the inihaw (grilled) section is priced between $5 and $7.
And to drink?
While Palay awaits its liquor licence, it's all about non-alcoholic samalamig, the kind of cold, refreshing drinks sold by street vendors across the Philippines. A rockmelon version is made by infusing the flesh into sugar syrup, then adding water and ice.
Where should I sit?
The front window is where it's at to get a sense of how the space has been brightened since it was Oko (and before that, Hell of the North). Palm-tree wallpaper wraps the bar, giving it ' White Lotus vibes', and the ceilings are all pastel hues.
What can I buy to take home?
A small retail section is stocked with locally roasted Akasya Kape coffee beans sourced from the Philippines, and imported condiments like Saint C calamansi extract. Soon, Palay's housemade banana ketchup, a staple Filipino condiment, will also be for sale.
What else should I know?
Once dine-in service hits its stride, the team will introduce takeaway coffee and Filipino baked goods, including fresh-out-the-oven pandesal in flavours like ube (purple yam).

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Two journalists, an eclectic restaurant and Taylor Swift: Inside the making of Jac Maley's new book
Two journalists, an eclectic restaurant and Taylor Swift: Inside the making of Jac Maley's new book

The Age

time30 minutes ago

  • The Age

Two journalists, an eclectic restaurant and Taylor Swift: Inside the making of Jac Maley's new book

Lunch begins with an editorial intervention. 'I want to say, for the record,' Jacqueline Maley – ever the journalist – announces. 'That this was on my vision board before Tay Tay came. I was so on the zeitgeist.' We're dining at Pellegrino 2000, tucked inside a historic terrace in Surry Hills, where the vibe is old-school Italian with a wink. Chianti bottles sit like trophies, tomato tins masquerade as rustic decor, and ropes of dried herbs and spices dangle above the bar. An eccentric collection of framed artwork lines the walls – including an image of the Michelin Man, beaming over the room like an ironic deity, blessing the carb-loading faithful below. It's theatrical, yet charming. The perfect setting for a pop star – or, in Maley's case, her second novel, Lonely Mouth. Long before Taylor Swift and her gal pal Sabrina Carpenter turned the restaurant into pop culture real estate when they spent the first night of their Eras and Sydney Zoo tour here, Maley was already a regular. She started visiting for the relaxed refinement and crema caramello alla banana (accompanied, no hyperbole, by an entire plate of cream!), but she kept visiting once she realised Pellegrino 2000 also served up perfect inspiration for a novel. 'It's one of my favourite Sydney restaurants,' Maley says. 'The restaurant I had in mind for the novel was elegant and cool, but it was never going to try too hard or be like a white tablecloth place. I love good food, but I hate any stuffy atmosphere.' Maley would sit at the bar, sketching details in a notepad, absorbing the restaurant's textures and rhythms. In Lonely Mouth, Pellegrino 2000 becomes the inspiration for the fictional Bocca – an Italian restaurant with a Japanese twist and a trattoria-meets–art deco aesthetic, located in Darlinghurst. Her narrator, Matilda, works there as the manager: a sharp and solitary 30-something nursing an unrequited crush on the restaurant's bad-boy owner, Colson, and quietly shouldering the aftershocks of her mother leaving her and her sister, Lara, when they were children (made doubly traumatic by the fact it happened outside the Big Merino rest stop at Goulburn, off the Hume Highway). As a menu reduces a sauce, so too does a plot summary flatten Lonely Mouth. It's a novel, rich with humour and sharp observations, about desire – for food, for love, for life – and what happens when that desire gets swallowed. It's about sisters, and mothers and daughters. And Bocca becomes more than a backdrop: it's a space where chaos meets order, appetite meets discipline, and everyone's slightly hungry for something they can't quite name. 'I knew I wanted to set the novel in a restaurant. I thought it would be a dynamic setting,' Maley says. 'I wanted it to be very realistic. I really wanted the restaurant to be like a character in the book, to be so atmospheric, it would take people there.' How many times did she visit Pellegrino 2000? 'You should ask my accountant when I put through my next tax return,' Maley quips. Mercifully, we avoid the worst part of Lunch Withs – the stilted pas de deux over the menu, the self-consciousness of wondering if one's contributions to the ordering are too much, too little, too indulgent, too virtuous. Maley takes full control, like someone who has asked far tougher questions than 'shared plates or mains'? To start, we opt for a pillowy focaccia and truffle-parmesan, an unexpectedly punchy caponata due to pickled celery, and a lush buffalo mozzarella, adorned with figs and honey. The wine stays on theme – a glass of Italian Pinot Grigio and a sharp Catarratto. Photographer Steven Siewert hovers nearby like a set designer reworking a diorama – moving errant phones out of frames, opening blinds for better light, repositioning cutlery with surgical precision. 'It is weird to be on the receiving end of what we usually do to other people,' Maley says. She has a deadline for her own Lunch With interview, with a senior public figure, looming. After completing an arts law degree, Maley started at The Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet in 2003. She comes from media stock: her mother, Judy, to whom Lonely Mouth is dedicated, worked at the Herald; her great-grandfather and great-uncle were political journalists; and her brother, Paul, was a reporter at The Australian. Maley's a senior writer, columnist, podcast host and newsletter editor and, today, the unfortunate soul sitting on the wrong side of the notepad. Yet, Maley's not entirely unprepared. This isn't our first time at the Lunch With table together. When her debut novel, The Truth About Her, came out in 2021, we met for breakfast in a courtyard of a cafe that was a little more toast crumbs than terrazzo tables. Now look at us: dining in a hot spot frequented by actual celebrities. For everyone's sake, I suggest Maley consider setting her next novel in a five-star resort. 'We're cosmopolitan ladies of the world now,' Maley retorts. 'I think we need to really level up. I'm thinking ... Denmark. What's that place? Noma.' The three-Michelin-star restaurant serves 20-course meals and regularly tops lists of the best restaurants in the world. For Lonely Mouth, Maley became something of a restaurant obsessive – fascinated by the ecosystems they contain and the quiet dramas unfolding between courses. She interviewed chefs and hospitality managers, read a stack of chef memoirs, watched YouTube videos of kitchens in action – and, for balance, quite a bit of The Great British Bake Off (the latter more for pleasure). In full Daniel Day-Lewis mode, she even picked up a few waitressing shifts. 'They were sort of a bit bemused, but they were nice about it. I just did what I was told. I think the other waiters were like: Who is this lady? But everyone tolerated me,' Maley says. 'People open up when you take a real interest in them, their lives, what they want to do, what they have done, the thing they are passionate about, and ask them to explain it to you. People were really giving that way, even though it was a weird ask, and no one really knew what I was doing.' It wasn't quite Down and Out in Paris, but the experience gave Maley what she needed: a feel for the choreography, the repetition, the small tensions and quiet triumphs of restaurant life. What surprised her was how much it resembled a newsroom – fast-paced, hierarchical, and always one dropped order away from chaos. 'It's a structured environment, but it attracts people who are unstructured in other ways. It's a little like journalism and a newsroom in that way,' she says. 'Journalists are not people who want to work a 9 to 5 job, they're in for the experience and the adventure. We're solo operators, but we have to work within an organism, which is the newsroom. Newspapers are very hierarchical, even though we're all recalcitrant personalities who don't like being told what to do.' With classic recalcitrance, I break the fourth wall to ask our off-duty journalist if she's enjoying her turn in the Lunch With hot seat. 'Are you checking in?,' Maley jokes. 'It's going great for me, but am I giving you what you need?' A master of the form, I ask Maley for her Lunch With advice – she's got the recipe down, but I'm probably still chopping onions. 'Just get them really drunk,' she deadpans. 'It's quite high pressure, I think. It's like a social interaction on the surface, but your journalist brain is constantly working. ' A pause in proceedings: the main. Pappardelle with stracciatella and truss tomatoes so ripe they look ready to explode on impact. Maley unfolds a paper napkin and tucks it, bib-style, into the relaxed collar of her blue silk shirt. She catches my eye – the journalist's brain, even now, still quietly whirring. 'Can you not put this in the piece?' A pause, a sigh, a smile. 'No, you can, if you want.' The same brain – always scanning for angles and incoming alerts– makes it hard for Maley to write fiction while working her day job. Journalism brings a constant overload of information, paired with the nagging sense you're always missing something important. And while her reporting and novels both circle themes of gender and power, she doesn't see them as flexing the same muscle. Her ideal writing conditions are long, uninterrupted stretches away from work, not trying to wedge sentences between school drop-offs, play dates, early dog walks and breaking news alerts. Annual leave became writing leave – less a break than a change of deadlines. There was also the pressure of following up the success of her first novel and being contracted to a deadline as part of a two-book deal – a deadline she fell so far behind on that she can't even precisely remember when it was. 'I didn't take a holiday in years,' Maley says. 'So I ended up, at the end of it, realising it's quite hard to juggle all of this. It took a toll on me in terms of stress levels, and so that was something that I wouldn't want to do again. ' She's got ideas bubbling away – another novel, maybe a non-fiction project – but for now, she's letting them simmer. And at least restaurants are just restaurants again, no longer research sites in disguise. Loading 'I love cooking, I love gardening. I want to take my dog for a walk, I want to watch TV,' Maley says. 'When you're writing a book, every time you're home, it's always there. And now I'm like, I want to do non-intellectual pursuits for a while.' But first, we have a joint byline to get. As a friendly waitress delivers an unplanned – but not unwanted – tiramisu, we seize the opportunity to try to get a scoop. Did Taylor Swift enjoy a tiramisu when she dined here? The response, cool and non-committal: 'Taylor Swift, who's that? I couldn't possibly say.'

Sydney Sweeney details 'crazy' transformation to play Christy Martin in biopic
Sydney Sweeney details 'crazy' transformation to play Christy Martin in biopic

Perth Now

time19 hours ago

  • Perth Now

Sydney Sweeney details 'crazy' transformation to play Christy Martin in biopic

Sydney Sweeney didn't fit into any of her clothes after she gained around 30lbs to play Christy Martin in a new biopic. The Euphoria actress is to star as the former professional boxer in an as-yet untitled movie, and Sweeney has told how she underwent a "crazy" transformation to get into character. Speaking to W Magazine, she said: "I came onboard to play Christy, and I had about three and a half months of training. "I started eating. "My body was completely different. "I didn't fit in any of my clothes. I'm usually a size 23 in jeans, and I was wearing a size 27. "My boobs got bigger. And my butt got huge. It was crazy! "I was like, 'Oh my god.' But it was amazing. I was so strong, like crazy strong." As well as eating more, the 'White Lotus' star had to train hard for the role, revealing she hit the weights for two hours a day and kickboxed for two hours. She added: "I weight-trained in the morning for an hour, kickboxed midday for about two hours, and then weight-trained again at night for an hour." Fans first discovered Sweeney had been cast to portray the boxing trailblazer, who has been described by producers as the "female Rocky", in May 2024. Speaking about the movie, the 'Anyone But You' star told Deadline at the time: "Christy Martin not only legitimized female boxing, she overcame gender stereotypes, and fought through emotional, physical, and financial abuse. "I'm passionate about the fighting world, Christy's story shines a light on her incredible rise to the top while showing the struggles of fame behind the curtains. "I feel compelled to tell a story about a woman who faced so much adversity and didn't allow it to defeat her. It's powerful, and emotional." Training for the movie wasn't Sweeney's first foray into kickboxing. She explained: "I grappled and did kickboxing from 12-19 years old. I've been itching to get back into the ring, train, and transform my body. "Christy's story isn't a light one, it's physically and emotionally demanding, there's a lot of weight to carry. But I love challenging myself."

Hannah Waddingham 'wants people to talk about how exhausting parenthood is'
Hannah Waddingham 'wants people to talk about how exhausting parenthood is'

Perth Now

time2 days ago

  • Perth Now

Hannah Waddingham 'wants people to talk about how exhausting parenthood is'

Hannah Waddingham wants more people to "talk" about "how exhausting" it is to be a parent. The Ted Lasso actress, 50, is mother to a 10-year-old daughter - who was born in 2015 during her previous relationship with Italian businessman Gianluca Cugnetto - but she has been raising her little girl alone since the couple's split and Hannah is adamant being a mother is hard work and that needs to be acknowledged. She told The Sunday Times newspaper: "Thank God she is the utter joy of my life because it is unyielding responsibility. "I feel like more people should talk about how exhausting it is. Not only physically showing up for them but being the best version of yourself, because they respond to actions far more than words." She added of her daughter: "[She's] my greatest champion and my most horrific critic." The youngster has taken an interest in acting and has been starring a school production of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe', but Hannah wants to make her daughter away of all the hard work that went into building her own career. She said: "She feels such a sense of vitality from that [being on stage], which I love, but I just want her to know that for 22 years I would be on stage thinking: 'Am I going to make the last Tube? "I need her to be aware that I really grafted for 22 years. Life is not being picked up by a black Mercedes." Hannah added that's she proud of her career success, but she doesn't care about being famous. She explained: "I've just become more known. Being afforded the luxury of the kind of roles that I always knew I could play and, as a single mum, the luxury of being able to put my daughter in great schools. "It does give you freedom. I genuinely don't give a s*** about fame. I never have. I never will." Hannah previously admitted she battles feelings of guilt whenever she's away from her little girl for work. She told PEOPLE: "My primary function is being a single mama ... Mommy guilt is real ... But I keep saying to her that we are a team and that I have to do this. "I have to strike while the iron is hot. I'm not so conceited that I would think that I will always have this kind of focus. I've always said to her: 'Mommy must take this time while the light shines on me, because the light shines on you'."

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store