Five Mistakes I Made While Covering Carinderia in Cebu

I remember a few years ago, the first time I opened my reporting notebook on karinderya in an alley near Carbon Market. Steam was rising from the stainless steel food trays, and the owner kept sneaking glances at what I was writing. I thought I was fairly well prepared. As a business journalist, I was used to dealing with numbers and trends. But properly capturing stories about food and people? That turned out to be an entirely different matter.

I Only Chased Pretty Plates

I'll be honest — in the early days, I looked for dishes that would pop on social media first. A piece of lechon arranged with nice colors on a banana leaf, a window seat with good light. What the locals actually bought and ate every day at that karinderya was an ordinary plate of rice with tuyo on the side, and it never even occurred to me to point a camera at it. What I realized later was that the smell, the grease, and the saltiness packed into that single tuyo were the true identity of the place.

I Never Asked the Owner's Story

This was my biggest mistake. I focused only on the menu board and prices. "Ginangga is 35 pesos, monggo is 25 pesos a bowl." I jotted down the numbers, made notes on the flavors, and left. Then one day, at a small eatery over in Mandaue, the owner spoke to me first. He told me he used to work on construction sites, but after his wife got sick, he started cooking at home, and that eventually became a restaurant. That one remark told me more than ten lines on a menu board ever could. Since then, I always ask first: "How did you get this place started?"

I Treated All of Cebu as One

Even within Cebu City, the character of karinderyas differs quite a bit from neighborhood to neighborhood. Around Colon Street, many cater to laborers grabbing a quick meal, while near IT Park there are places that stay open at two in the morning for call center night-shift workers. At first, I made no such distinctions and wrote under the lumped-together frame of "Cebu's karinderyas." If you were a reader, how would you figure out where to actually go?

I Started Documenting Too Late

Despite having a hobby of collecting vintage cameras, when it came to actual reporting I would snap careless shots with my phone, telling myself I'd organize them later. Karinderyas disappear faster than you'd think. The day a noodle shop in Talisay I used to frequent pulled its shutters down for good, all I had left were two blurry photos. I can still vividly remember the taste of that broth, and it still bothers me that I have no image to convey it.

I Tried Too Hard to Separate Reporting from Eating

Lastly, I tried too hard to separate reporting from eating. I would spread open my notebook, prepare a list of questions, and sit down as if conducting a formal interview. But a karinderya is the kind of place where your elbow bumps the person next to you and you ask, "What's that you're having?" Closing the notebook and just eating actually gave me better material to write about. These days I go empty-handed on purpose and eat first. The documenting comes after.

I still make mistakes. But when I stand in front of the food trays at the end of an alley, I stand a little longer and listen a little more carefully than I used to. What about you — have you ever walked past a place a hundred times, only to realize you never really looked?