Paper #5: Quickie Beverage Review - Champion Cha-yen! …. Cheap! Cheers!

The quest for good food on a shoestring budget is typical with the average chronically-low-on-funds college student. One of the metro’s best kept secret lies in a dingy little place on a narrow side street in Barangay Poblacion, Makati. It’s so out-of-the-way, you’d still miss it even if you knew where it was but didn’t look hard enough.

Som’s, as the establishment is called, lies on a small street parallel to Rockwell Drive, right by the Ateneo Law School. Easy enough right? Not really, because a brick and steel fence hides it from plain sight and all you might see from the road is the top of a corrugated steel sheet roughly painted “SOM’S”. You have to go up into the tight intersection beside Congo Grill on the corner of Kalayaan Ave. and Rockwell Drive. Head straight up and if you see plastic monobloc chairs and tables, you’ve found it. If you reach a Flamenco school and the *cough*-“gentleman’s club”-*cough*, you’ve passed it and you have to back up maybe twenty meters.

Som’s is a Thai restaurant crammed into the ground floor of a duplex. The term “restaurant” is used loosely here, as you have to eat on rickety plastic monobloc chairs and tables or on the two rough-hewn, rectangular tables covered in tacky vinyl canvas. To complete the carinderia ambience, there’s a videoke machine in the house next door and cats may play merry hell under your tables. One orders at a small booth outside their kitchens where the food is freshly prepared to order, stopping short of being a “turo-turo” carinderia where one picks the food out of a line of pots. Som’s is basically your good-‘ol friendly neighborhood carinderia, scaled up in class just a tad.

But don’t let appearances fool you! This quaint little nook serves the best Thai food in Makati, possibly in Metro Manila, all for rock-bottom prices! But I’ll leave off from describing the food for another time. I’ll be talking about their amazingly good Thai tea for now.

If you don’t know, Thai tea is served cold, with a lot of milk. Som’s Thai tea doesn’t deviate much from the classic version, but what makes it special is that it only costs thirty pesos (P30) and the taste easily bests the milk teas served in other extremely expensive Thai restaurants around the city. Som’s tea is supposedly prepared according to traditional Thai recipes, with steeped Thai red tea, sugar, condensed and evaporated milk, so the tea is a bit sweet and sinfully calorie rich. The tea may be diabolically addictive but diabetics and those watching their figure better stop at just one glass!

The sweetish brew’s tea taste has interesting flavor highlights that I still can’t pin down as to what they are. A friend tells me he tastes star anise in it but I can only take his word for it. The outstanding quality of the drink is that the strong tea flavor is mellowed by the creaminess of the milk. Or maybe the soft creaminess of the milk is tempered by the tea flavor. Okay, the taste still boggles my taste buds even after having had it so many times. Maybe the better description would be that the ingredients blend together in a harmonious synergistic balance that enhances all their flavors, instead of one taste drowning out the others, as what usually happens in the beverages served in other establishments.

Served with a glass of ice, the tea is presented in a small and plain mineral water bottle that looks like it’s been recycled (and probably has been!). Well, with all the pollution in the metro, we do need to learn how to recycle. The amazingly rich and flavorful tea comes in that unassuming container, another example why looks can be deceiving. See, the tea may even teach important life lessons for only thirty bucks!