High expectations

At 38 floors up, Finestra at Solaire Resort North makes a case for everyday Italian in QC

- FELICIANO RODRIGUEZ III

Living in the northern reaches of the metro, Quezon City, QC, “Kyusi” for millennials, I am not sure what Gen Z or Gen Alpha call the country’s most populous city and one of its largest by land area, if there is a new term at all—growing up in that city, I always had the impression that for snazzy hotel dinners, you had to head south.

I remember the iconic InterContinental hotel in Makati, demolished in 2016. I even attended the final media farewell staycation for Intercon in November 2015, already a lifestyle journalist at the time. Now I am feeling old.

In Intercon, in our family, when you reach the age of seven, they bring you to dine at Prince Albert Rotisserie to learn how to properly behave in a fine dining setting and how to correctly use cutlery. As young ones, we learned how to interact with staff, how to order food, and that there are places where you do not simply barge in but wait to be seated. It was an initiation. In short, that is where we learned proper decorum and manners outside the home and school. That was all in Makati.