Sunday, January 8, 2012

Midas Cafe at Midas Hotel

Genesis Hotels and Resorts, an all Filipino property management group who brought to you Astoria Boracay, One Tagaytay Place and Bellarocca Island Resort and Spa, laid down the foundation of coming up another hotel landmark in the Philippines. The site? That old Hyatt Hotel location. The name? Midas Hotel.


Now that the site is owned by another hospitality group, will it ever live up to its luxurious legacy of being a location of a "famed sunset boulevard of the Orient"?


Midas Hotel boasts of a fascinating deluxe interior designed by the country's renowned designer Samson-Almario. True enough, when I get inside, I was enthralled by the Almario signature designs, the touch of white and black in the walkway crisscrossed by a kaleidoscope of vibrant colors and the verdant green and immaculate white inside their resident restaurant, Midas Cafe.


One can never ignore the Hermes-design neatly stacked on shelves where the grand piano is located at. The well-lit walls and the minimalist chandelier, a hanging crystal wires that looks like a fiber optic tip, speaks of utter elegance.


This is me in the pic unfurling my MacBook Air. :)


Pasta with mixed vegetables and mushrooms.


So what else do they have on buffet their spread.


Started off with these.


Steamed Lapu-Lapu.


Prioritize all tender meats first when in a buffet.


Citrus-Glazed Shrimp.


Lamb Patties with Tomato Basil.


Sweet variant. My sweet tooth can't help it.


Slice your own loaf. I got the wheat variant.


Assorted bread.


Salami and some bread-must-have's.


Different types of cheese, Cheddar, Gouda, Manchego, Cream Cheese, and a lot more. They even have that Filipino white cheese.


You can also put this in your bread. :)


Stir-fried vegetables. Be sure to take one in a buffet, veggies will aid in the speedy digestion process.


Oriental style fried chicken.


Duck confit. Best paired with wine.


Emince of Pork, swiss style.


Spicy Beef Caldereta but you can't see the beef because they're hidden underneath the piles of veggies.


Pork. What's this entree called again?


Other aquiatic variants are Shrimp.


And other seafoods.


For the grilling station, they have Salmon….


Chicken.


And pork belly.


And my other favorite section of the buffet, the Carving Station. The other being the Desserts Section. This is a US Beef Striploin Steak.


Garden-fresh salad with different types of dressing, Tomatao Vinaigrette, French Dressing, Ceasar Dressing, Thousand Island Dressing, Midas Dressing, etc.


Two-toned salad.


Soup. They also have other soups as well, Creamy Chowder and the Chinese Molo Soup.


Asian section including Japanese Maki, Sushi, sashimi, Chinese Molo Soup, Chinese Noodle Soup, Xia Long Bao, etc.


Let's see what do they have for desserts.


Fresh fruits, watermelon, pineapple, melon, etc.


Layers of panna cotta and a fruit salad on top.


Rice cakes and more.


Round of sweets.


Sweets again.


More sweets.


Cake-eoso delicioso.


Let's see what's on my table.


DIY-ing my own salad.


Mixed seafoods. You see, even in a buffet, I still observe proper plating. That is to heighten appetite, because the more delicious-looking the food in your plate is, the more you'd want them.


Shrimp and veggies.


Oriental style chicken and lamb patties.


Pork belly and chicken with bathed in a delicious barbecue sauce.


Lamb, Duck Confit, and crunchy steamed veggies.


A parade of Asian goodness, a Xiao Long Bao, Japanese Maki, Sushi, and Sashimi.


And my favorite part in a buffet, a juicy steak. This time, it's a US Beef striploin.


Hoarding lots of sweets, I did it right before my meal started.


Concluding my meal. I picked one mango at the buffet table and had the chef sliced it for me.


Some hotel buffets that I have tried don't have an extensive array, and perhaps lacks two components, lamb and a steak. They have both although their lamb is already in fillet form, but their desserts, as many as it could have been, lacks halo-halo station and ice cream station. But at Php899 care of a groupon voucher, it was ok.


And oh, how's it if I'm going to post my top ten buffet places for 2011. What do you think.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Tech Talk 2012: Ultrabook

The beginning of the year is undoubtedly the best time to be a technology soothsayer, predicting the year's upcoming technology hitmakers and forecasting the Silicon Valley's buzz word.


Cutting-edge design gizmos started cropping up as early as the first quarter and vehemently topping one over the other the next month or so. A quintessential search for the best technology that could work wonders for us consumers culminates at the beginning of the year.


A lot has been said about TABLETS replacing NETBOOKS from the past year, but there are more exciting tech toys that didn't even lift off into a large consumer base. Take PURSEBOOKS(e.g., Lenovo Pocket Yoga and Sony Vaio P series) for example, having such a laptop at the palm of your hand is really a work of art, but the meager battery capacity defeated its mobile purpose.


This year, everybody's rooting for the ULTRABOOK. With the advent of MacBook Air, the market for ultrathin laptops broadens. And everybody's churning out their own iteration of razor- thin laptops, Acer has Aspire S3, Asus has ZenBook, Lenovo has the ThinkPad X1, and Toshiba the Portege Z830. But the ultrathin technology has been in the midst since 2004, remember Sony Vaio X505? So what's the fuzz now. Better battery? Faster proc? Better GPU?


There are considerations one has to think though when availing any of these ultrabooks:


1) SSD - Solid State Drives are damn too pricey. And having a 256GB of disk space is tantamount to getting two pieces of 1TB SATA.


2) Battery Life - one letdown of a mobile technology is having a battery that doesn't even last for a day. Imagine making an urgent proposal at Starbucks for an hour, and while having a dinner at a restaurant, your boss called up to produce Sales Performance Review report. That's already two hours all in all. But if your device can barely last for two hours, then it's a technology self-collapse in the making.


What about you. How mobile and compact your device is and how long will it last for a day's regular use(office productivity, email checking and browsing).


And oh, talking about ultraportability, I just shrunk my MacBook Air and it's now the smallest in the world, hahahaha.

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