Tablo Scout Borromeo, Tomas Morato Honest Review

As yesterday was a holiday, I was super psyched to go exploring and trying new restaurants. Top of the list? Tablo – located at Scout Borromeo, Tomas Morato. I’ve heard it was beautiful and that it was ALWAYS full, so my plan was to get there at 10AM sharp, right when it opens, to make sure we could snag a seat.

Well, there was no need to be THAT early. At around 11AM (when we arrived), the place was only half full so we were able to choose a nice outdoor seat. The outdoors is lovely – nice color palette, lots of plants, an electric fan blowing straight at you to ensure it’s breezy. Beautiful.

Ambiance-wise, this restaurant gets a nice solid 8/10. Could be better if there was more parking.

Moving forward, let’s discuss the more pertinent parts of a restaurant (in my opinion): the food and the service.

 

Tablo Food Review

We started off with Salt + Pepper Calamari (PHP 380) for appetizers. This was composed of Crispy Squid Rings and Tortilla Chips+Cheese, with Marinara and House Made Ranch.

This was…. a letdown. There is no nicer way to say it. The squid itself was tender, but it certainly wasn’t crispy – the batter wasn’t great and it didn’t have enough flavor on its own. The tortilla chips were lackluster too. We didn’t finish it. Boo.

For the actual lunch meal, we got the Salt + Pepper Pork Steak (PHP 395) and the Bourbon BBQ Pork Belly (PHP 395). My friend said he quite liked these two dishes. I am baffled. I didn’t like them.

For the Salt + Pepper Pork Steak – I felt there was a lot more batter than pork. Also, my mom makes better pork chops than this. Chubby Mommy has WAAAY better pork chop than this. I really liked the cucumber ensalada though.

The Bourbon BBQ Pork Belly was a lot more flavorful, but I found it quite fatty – and not the good kind of fat that melts in your mouth either.

Overall – miss. I would NOT return for the food.

 

Tablo Service Review

The servers are very nice, don’t get me wrong, but WOW, the service as a whole sucks. They have this really weird system where only YOUR server can take your order. So if you flag down someone else, they’ll go off to get your server to serve you. I don’t know about you – but I found this incredibly inefficient! Gosh, I just want to order. It’s literally 3 dishes, can you not just write it down and pass it on to our server if needed?

Food came out quite slowly too. For me, my most important metric for a restaurant is how good the food it, and how quickly it comes out. Ambiance is not so important, server friendliness and chit-chat also not important. I come here to eat, so I want my food rawr.

 

Overall, Tablo is fairly new so I hope they can still improve on their food and service. But as of now, this restaurant’s a hard pass for me.