My hubby and I basically loves to eat siomai. Before we would buy it at Henlin, a pioneer for their good tasting siomai and siopao. But siomai was even more popularized by the fast growing food cart business that is almost seen everywhere in the metro, so we eventually switched. Food cart according to wiki is a mobile kitchen that is set up on the street to facilitate the sale and marketing of street food to people from the local pedestrian traffic. Food Cart is often found in large cities throughout the world and can be found selling food of just about any variety. Well in our case here in the Philippines i think siomai is the most popular of all the variety being sold.
Well enough of the trivia now and let me go back to my story. Whenever we go to the mall we would usually stop by the food court where the siomai cart is. Our all time favorite is the japanese siomai by Master Siomai, they really do serve good tasting steamy siomao with a very affordale price of P28.00 per serving(4 pcs). Well they also have the classic pork and beef siomai but we prefer the japanese siomai as it is topped with a piece of crab meat and wrapped in Nori, a shredded and rack-dried variety of edible seaweeds commonly used as a wrap for sushi. I'm not so new with the nori, my sisters who lives in Japan would usually bring home several pack of nori for pasalubong and we'd usually eat it with steamy rice, that is why i am familiar with the taste of it. I really love the nori as it adds more flavor and as they say "yumminess" to the regular siomai especially when dipped in their sauce which is not the typical soy sauce as it is a bit sweet. You also have an option to put calamansi and garlic chili sauce to add a little spice in it, but in my case i'd rather not. I'm not so into spicy foods. They also have iced cold gulaman to quench your thirst and neutralize the aftertaste.
Today it was not only me and my hubby who patronizes siomai, even my five year old son now craves for it. When i introduced it to him i never expected for him to like it because of the nori, plus the fact that he never really liked to eat meat so much. But surprisingly after the first time he tasted it he did liked it and now often asks me to go to this place to eat japanese siomai. I remember one time when we were at the mrt station in Quezon Avenue, he spotted a siomai cart and eagerly asked me to stop by and eat. At home he likes to eat the japanese siomai with steamy rice. The photo on the right shows li'l osh enjoying a serving of japanese siomai and a glass of gulaman.
Japanese Siomai, definitely siomai reinvented. ^_^