South Bay - Drive In, Pototoes & Dona's Filipino Food

After our awesome visit to makeout central, we headed westward on Coronado Street to have a quick bite to eat before having our ice cream. We passed by the last remaining drive in theatre in San Diego, the South Bay Drive In.

The first (and last) time Bert and I tried watching a movie there was for the movie "Wayne's World 2"! Holy fk! Ha ha, that was in 1993. It was raining that night and we'd never gone to a drive in together. Since we liked the first movie, we thought the sequel might be just as funny. We were wrong. First of all, we ended up leaving 30 minutes into the movie and getting our money back because we weren't able to get good reception on our crappy stereo system.  Secondly, the movie sucked hairy veiny zebra ballz too. What a waste of 30 minutes of our lives.

This is one of my favorite signs - This place is on the corner of Coronado and Saturn. Heh - "pototoes"! I love it.The prices have gone up little by little over the years. These things used to be $3 each!

As you make a right onto Saturn, you will see Jack in the Crack on the left, complete with unchanged 1970's puffy font (none of this newfangled "Jack" logo here - it's old school all the way baby!). There is a big parking lot for the Albertson's and Rite-Aid in the strip mall. Look for the stand alone building in the middle. Albertsons used to be Alpha Beta (remember that?) and Rite-Aid used to be Thrifty's where .15 used to buy you one cylindrical scoop of ice cream. If you had money to burn, then it was .25 for 3 scoops. Prices, obviously have gone up, and I haven't had ice cream there in years.

Look for these signs in that stand alone building and find a parking spot.  Looks like the former site of Lisa's Desserts changed into Dona's Hawaiian and Filipino Grill. Wait, let me back up. Dona's opened up in December of 2009 so it must have been something else before it turned into Dona's because I remember Lisa's was already gone during a recent visit earlier this year. The address is the same too (I zoomed on my photos). Click here to see and read an old post of mine from Feb 2008 about this particular strip mall. Now that was a mouthful, wasn't it? The t-shirt store with the nasty shirts is now gone by the way.

Like most Filipino food joints, this was a point-point (turo turo) place with steam tables galore. Since we got there at 12 noon, all the trays were freshly made and filled to the brim.  And what's with the "Hawaiian" in the name of this place? I didn't recognize any Hawaiian items here at all. It was strictly Filipino food from what I could see.  Another thing, their receipt had "Donna's" on it, not "Dona's". That really irks me - their sign is wrong, or their cash register printer thing is wrong. WTF people. Get it right. But spelling aside, let's get to the food, shall we?

At the far left was pancit, then longganisa, some sort of soup, then fried fish and pork afritada. In the lower right corner were bbq pork skewers. I snapped these pics on the sly while the lady was getting my rice. There's other stuff on the far left that I couldn't see but it all looked good to me. The tray in the middle (dark meat) was what I got, the dreaded Diniguan (pork blood stew), aka "Chocolate Meat"! Next to that was pork menudo (Philippine style not Mexican).

Here's a close up of that glorious pork bbq. In the upper right was bistec with grilled onions.

I have no idea what that food was in the lower left corner; maybe it was something "Hawaiian" but it looked kind of gray and unappetizing. Next to the bistek was beef mechado (a type of really rich beef stew). See that solitary tray on the counter (upper right)? That was sisig! I was so tempted to get that! Nice and sour, fatty, crunchily unctuous chopped pork belly with peppers and onions.

Next to the beef mechado was pork with onions, coconut milk and bagoong (salted shrimp paste) with long beans. Underneath that was a soupy chicken dish (sorry, don't know the name of it). The soup near the sisig tray was sinigang (sour soup) and beneath the soup was sliced opo squash with shrimp. There was another unidentified dish in the far right corner and more of that sisig below it.

There were some banana fritters on the counter (turon) along with packages of dried Philippine mango (you can get the bigass sizes of this from Costco, banana leaf wrapped rice cakes (suman), white rice cakes (putong puti), ube filled cakes (hopya) and peanuts.

See that sign? These are terms for Filipino street food: "Isaw" are intestines; "Adidas" is marinated "Chicken Feet"; while "Walkman" refers to pig's ears. Nice.  Hey, they forgot "Betamax" (curdled chicken blood cubes)!
 
Here's a closeup of their sign. We all got the 1 item combo with rice (except Bert upgraded to pancit, so it was $5 for him).

Here's Bert's 1 combo plate: Longganisa (sweet pork sausage) with pancit bihon. Now this was probably one of the better versions of pancit I've tasted. They had a lot of vegetables and chicken in here, unlike some places where it's all cabbage or celery and no meat at all. Of course, my mom puts at least four types of protein in her pancit (fish cake, chicken, sliced Chinese sausage and shrimp). The noodles were also cooked just right - not mushy at all like some places where you could tell they did a crappy rush job with making it. Each noodle was nice and long. I hate really short noodles. Bert liked his dish except he wished that they cut up the celery in smaller pieces.

Here's a cross section of that heart attack waiting to happen. Can you see the paprika tinged pork fat? That shit is good I say! (in moderation of course, heh)

Here is my plate because although I was eyeing that tray of sisig like Wimpy eyes hamburgers, I wanted this even more. For those of you that don't know, the word "dinuguan" is derived from the word "dugo" (pronounced 'doo-goh', accent on the second syllable), the Tagalog word for "blood".

Traditionally Dinuguan is made with pork meat and innards along with onions, garlic, peppers and that special ingredient, pig's blood. Yum, yum. I ordered it once just to freak out some non-Filipino friends. I don't think they appreciated seeing it and one person in particular didn't like the smell. Cough *pussies* Cough. To me, it smelled and tasted just fine. But back to Dona's version of dinuguan - it was pretty good but it was missing the mild peppers (not the bell pepper but that smaller yellowish green one, I think it might be the banana pepper), thus no kick.

This was TC's plate - the Pork Afritada (pork stewed in tomato sauce with onions, garlic, red pepper strips, peas and potatoes, or should I say, "pototoes"). We all had bits of each other's food, with Bert's longganisa being the hit of the day.

Of course, these were ginormous portions and we certainly didn't eat all that fkg food. Who do you tink we are? Lard-Ass Davy Hogans eating blueberry pie ("Stand by Me" reference)? No, we have more self restraint than that and we consciously shut down our "off switches" in preparation for dessert...No, not this, the Turrones de Casoy. This is a Pampangan specialty which is cashew nougat wrapped in an unleavened edible wrapper (kind of like a Communion wafer but not). I was so excited when I saw these and had to have a package. Heh heh, she said "package".

There isn't a lot of seating here. Just 3 small tables and 7 or  chairs. In the corner is a wire rack holding more Filipino snacks like fried pork skins (mmmm, healthy), fried corn, Chocnut (a horrible pasty thinly flavored Chocolate candy), Japanese snacks ("Hello Panda") and other food items (banana ketchup, sauce of lechon and more..

Was it even possible to even eat another bite?

Yes it was...

Oasis here we come!