ILOILO AND THE ART OF HI-LO EATING

Fashionistas have just started trumpeting Hi-Lo dressing of late.

- LISA GUERRERO NAKPIL

That's the magic of combining high-end designer treasures such as Gucci jackets and Prada bags with high-street finds such as H&M tees and Uniqlo trousers. There has been, however, a long-standing culinary tradition of juxtaposing the upmarket with street food and Iloilo City has mastered that very particular art of Hi-Lo Eating.

To be sure, there are exemplars of the high life and the low tech all over Iloilo, as there are in any Philippine city; it's just that Iloilo seems to do it with a bit more panache. Thus, one can embark on a moonlit tour of millionaires' mansions (the Don Emiliano Lizares monolith featuring 59 rooms behind Versailles-style gates is the high point) or follow the famous esplanade snake through mangroves. There are pastel-colored art-deco resto-palaces but also holes-in-the-wall (Roberto's on J.M. Basa St, Iloilo City Proper) that re-create childhood memories of convent-school meriendas of siopaos. Here is a shortlist that combines the sublime at both ends of the spectrum.

PLAZA DE MOLO
Outside Sta. Ana (St. Anne's) Church
Plaza de Molo sits outside the magnificent Sta. Ana Church, renowned for the reassuring double row of 16 female saints, the place for women to pray for all their secret special intentions--even if you aren't Blake Lively vanquishing sleazy movie producers.

Under a starry-night sky, women toil before a row of wood-burning ovens, the kind you would have to pay top peso for in BGC, producing freshly baked bibingka for just P5 each, beside stalls hawking hardboiled eggs and pink popcorn.

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