Together, it's a breakfast that I'd gladly have for lunch, dinner, or any meal in between. The latter does it best of all, pairing with the pork more naturally than sauerkraut to a hot dog. Also there to temper and contrast: plain-diced tomato, cucumber, and achara, pickled shreds of green papaya. To beat back the richness, Tapa Boy supplies a spicy vinegar of its own making that it thickens to the consistency of bottled Italian dressing. Once its cooked, tocino takes on a candy-like sheen and wiggles in your mouth before melting like an unctuous piece of pork belly. It beams with a ruddy color almost akin to Chinese char siu, but thanks to annatto it's even brighter, as if it's been dipped in Maraschino cherry syrup. Tocino is a breakfast meat that glistens like no other. Together they form the suffix and anchor for things like the tocilog, which features tocino, a cured pork product cut from the fattiest parts of the pig. The Filipino answer to the American bacon and egg breakfast, "silog" is a concatenation of two words: sinangag (fried rice) and itlog (fried egg). One of them is this truck, Tapa Boy, which actually made the trek to Irvine and parked right where I just happened to be during my lunch hour. It leaves behind at least three other Filipino food truck to pick up the slack in LA County. But then I was bummed when it announced it would stop prowling the streets last month after garnering much kudos from the likes of Jonathan Gold. Manila Machine was a culmination of his journey, and I was proud to be one of the first members of the press to report on the roll out, the first Filipino food truck in L.A. As a reader, I witnessed his growth from an assimilated Pinoy with a "retarded appreciation of Filipino food" to a well-rounded Filipino food scholar, chef, and upcoming cookbook author, who passionately chronicled his efforts in an often hilarious blog. Burnt Lumpia), whom I regard as one of the funniest food bloggers in the country. You see, I've long been a fan of Manila Machine's owner and chef, Marvin Galputos (a.k.a. It's just I had hoped to have tried Manila Machine first before it retired to do just private catering events. It's with sadness that I review Tapa Boy.
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