Goldilocks, 1420 E. Plaza Blvd D-7, National City, California 91950
By Sandi Masori
NATIONAL CITY, California — In this suburb of San Diego, you can find many ethnic restaurants, and especially a lot of Filipino restaurants. We went to one such restaurant, by the name of Goldilocks.
Upon walking in the first thing you notice is the display of cakes for weddings and birthdays. Goldilocks started as a bakery and grew into a full-fledged restaurant. As I’ve mentioned previously, I prefer going to ethnic restaurants that are populated by the natives of that cuisine, and in Goldilocks I was not disappointed. I was happy to see that most of the tables in the restaurant were occupied by Filipinos, many of whom were speaking Tagalog. Upon seeing that, I knew that the restaurant should be pretty good and authentic.
I asked the waitress for a recommendation of something that was traditionally Filipino but that didn’t have pork or shellfish. She recommended the Beef Kare-Kare, a stew that had oxtail, tripe, beef cheek and assorted vegetables in a peanut sauce that had a curry like consistency, and that you spread over rice. I wouldn’t have known that it was a peanut base if the menu hadn’t said so. It had a pleasant, mild, sweet flavor, but I wouldn’t have known what it was. In the stew were chunks of meat. The portion size was generous, and there was enough to take home.
My companion had the fresh vegetarian lumpia, a dish I had never seen before. I’ve seen fried lumpia, which are similar to egg rolls, but this was a bit more like a wet burrito, with a sweet, savory sauce on top of a tortilla like wrapper with vegetables inside. The lumpia skin is a little denser than a tortilla in texture though. The flavor was nice and the sweet and savory worked well together. We also ordered a mango salad that included slices of young mango and diced tomatoes. The mangoes were actually really good when dipped into the kare- kare sauce.
The food came out pretty quickly after we ordered, but as the restaurant filled up, it got harder to get the attention of the waitress and we had to flag someone down to refill our teas, but other than that the service was okay. I don’t know if they were short staffed or just inattentive, but they did lose some points for it.
I don’t have a lot of experience with Filipino food, so it was an interesting culinary adventure. Next time I might try the Chicken Adobo which apparently is the most well-known Filipino dish after fried lumpia.
All in all, I give Goldilocks an 8 out of 10.
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Masori is the restaurant and food reviewer for San Diego Jewish World. If you have a favorite restaurant you would like her to review, please contact her via sandi.masori@gmail.com