Dinner at Jo's Chicken Inato restaurant near St. Paul's University proved to be a meal of discoveries and rediscoveries. Though it was their buko halo that lured us to this inasal house that time, we can't say no to their specialty; chicken inato. It's chicken barbecue served Dumaguete style for which the said restaurant originated. A favorite during my college years, Jo's chicken inato has seen many treats, events or even just simple eats.
For this dinner, we rediscovered their chicken inato and discovered a new dish, manok sa buko.Their chicken inato was still the same - delicious until to the last bite that I can't help but eat bare hands.
Grilled and flavoured like the way I liked it then, it has maintained all throughout these years its distinct barbecue taste with local touch when dipped in a calamansi-soy sauce-vinegar concoction.
Manok sa buko turned out to be almost quite like chicken binakol. Akin to tinola, only added with coconut meat and juice, that made the broth mildly sweet. One can even scrape the coconut meat off the shell that also serves as the serving bowl.
Topping off that great dinner was what we actually came for, buko halo. A mixture of sweet corn, gelatin, macapuno, ube, coconut strips served in its signature coconut shell topped with ice cream. Just a simple halo halo made special the way it was presented. If only the ice cream wasn't melted, it would have been a picture perfect dinner, literally.