I came here with a medium sized group and we shared everything family style… Tito Rad’s Grill & Restaurant is perfect for that!
The appetizers we started off with were the lumpiang shanghai (lumpia) which is my all time favorite Filipino food and ukoy (bean sprout fritters). The lumpia had a mixture of pork, shrimp and mixed vegetable and was a perfect blend inside the extremely wonderful crispy shell. The bean sprout fritters were something new for me… The bean sprouts are fried in a batter, along with shrimp and vegetables. It was quite good as well with a nice bold flavor.
We also had quite a few main courses, such as pork adobo, a departure from the usual chicken adobo dish. It was really good, marinated in soy sauce, peppercorn and spices, cooked with onions. The pork was perfectly tender and well seasoned.
I also liked the BBQ pork chop and we even ordered another serving of that because we enjoyed it so much! The meat was juicy and very tasty. The accompanying sauce was worked really well with the pork chop.
Then there was the grilled tuna belly, which was great as well. The skin was grilled just right and tasted wonderful with the meat.
We chose 2 noodle dishes: Pancit and crispy noodles. The one I liked better was the pancit – sautéed egg noodles cooked with chicken, shrimp, chinese sausage, carrots, lettuce, other greens. It was a great medley of ingredients and each one tasted fresh and full of flavor. The other one had carrots, green beans, broccoli, chicken on top of a bed of crispy noodles. I liked the crunch of the noodles but it wasn’t quite as flavorful as the pancit.
My least favorite dish was called Laing – taro leaves cooked with green peppers and apparently some sort of meat but I couldn’t taste any of that. It looked like a mess of green and I didn’t find it to be that good. It was lacking in flavor and I wasn’t a fan of the consistency and texture.
After all that, we had to try some dessert. I was sold on the Halo Halo, which is shaved ice with ice cream, condensed milk, sweet beans, jello, taro cake, fruits! One of my table mates declared that it was good for one person, so I ordered that and it came in a HUGE cup. There was so much in there and it was delightful, although difficult to finish because the shaved ice was really cold (pointing out the obvious here, I know)! The ice cream was French Vanilla with strawberry jelly swirl on top and though I don’t normally enjoy vanilla ice cream by itself, this ice cream was incredibly delicious: Creamy, sweet, milky and most of all, intense and fresh vanilla flavor! All the other ingredients were also quite good and the condensed milk tinged everything and gave it an extra level of sweet yumminess!
The service was pretty good and there was a lovely lady who came by several times to make sure we were doing okay and we got everything we ordered. She was a very gracious host.
All in all, a wonderful evening filled with quality Filippino food and great company!
Tito Rad’s Grill
49-10 Queens Blvd
Queens, NY
Dress, Dine & Sparkle 