Comfort food

Happy birthday tomorrow, Pat-P! We chose Independence Day to eat in a Filipino restaurant, in a city where Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, American, and Korean flavors add an extra ingredient to the air of a fiesta on every street corner every day, any day.

- JULLIE Y. DAZA

If in the nascent days of civilization a family needed a pathfinder, a hunter, and a gatherer to source and cook the ingredients for a satisfying meal, we elected cousin Ann to play all three roles for us in our search for something familiar but something new along restaurant row.

She did not blink when she piped up to say, "I know just the place!"