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Philippine Street Food • Beef Pares

Here in our country, we love street food. It is fast, cheap, and can be found almost anywhere. There is a dish which I consider the most popular street food in our country. This is the well-loved Beef Pares. Come with us today as I share with you one of the favorite spots in our city where you could enjoy this dish.

Food carts and small stalls have sprouted all over the country that sells Beef Pares. Some have started small and slowly improved their stall. As I recall this stall used to be small when they were just starting.

Here the first thing you would notice is two huge pots that contain the Beef Pares and the other one usually contains broth for the beef noodles.

They only have two dishes dishes on the menu.

Beef Pares - 50 pesos ($1.00)USD including garlic fried rice.
Beef Mami (Beef Noodles - ($0.87)USD with the option of rice or egg

Beef pares is usually made from Beef brisket but in food stalls, they use cheaper cuts of beef. In the majority of the food carts, they use the beef head. It is boiled until tender with onions, garlic and star anise. For added flavor, they add additional powdered beef flavoring.

Some stalls offer additional meat variants. This would include beef tripe, brains and eyes. Some of you might feel squeamish about it. I have never tried the brains and eyes but a lot of people say that they are very good. I may hunt for a stall one of these days that offer them.

We only ordered one serving and this is served in a bowl wrapped in plastic. They wrap the bowls in plastic so there would need to wash the bowls. They just discard the plastic and replace it with a new one once the customer is done. Not environmentally friendly if I may say but this has been the practice in a lot of food stalls.

One cup of fried rice is included with the beef pares. They add some garlic, others fry the rice with margarine and some use soy sauce with the fried rice. This one I think is fried with garlic with margarine.

The meat on the serving of the Pares is just enough for one meal. The best part is the little bit of beef fat included in each serving. The beef fat is creamy, buttery and you could even as for extra if the vendor is generous.

The seating arrangement is like a bar setup around the stall.

There is one table at the back where we chose to sit. It is underneath a big fire tree and is very shady during the afternoons.

There are four condiments that you could add to your Beef Pares. Fried garlic, spring onions, chili oil and Calamansi (Philippine Lime). It is best to add them all to experience the full flavor of this dish.