Incredulous in Iloilo

Iloilo City. Not that she didn’t like the steaming molo soup she had for dinner at Century 21 Hotel the night before. But the visitor, who fancies herself an adventurous eater, wants to try something else for lunch -- elsewhere. After all, she calculates, the series of meetings she has gone to Iloilo for does not begin until 2 p.m.

She decides to walk, prodded on by the pleasant drizzle that greets her outside the hotel lobby. She goes past an Internet café, a hardware store, an ukay-ukay shop, a pharmacy, and sundry establishments before she realizes Quezon Street wasn’t restaurant row. So when the drizzle threatened to escalate into a downpour, she backtracks.

Opposite the hotel she came from, she espies a three-storey shopping center which she must have overlooked on the way out. “Payless Plaza” – it says. It looks promising. “Why not,” she tells herself and makes a dash for it.

Past a cashier who tries to tell her something urgently in Visayan, she goes smack into a buffet setting.

“How much?” she asks one of the service crew. “Fifty pesos ma’am, but you have to pay first.” Back to the kahera who earlier tried to stop her, she asks again: “Are you sure it’s P50?” The kahera nods with a smile. “Eat all you can?” “ She nods again. “Is this lunch?” “With dessert,” she answers this time.




The buffet spread was incredible for the P50 being asked. Two kinds of salad: vegetable and macaroni. Five main dishes: fried chicken, chicken afritada, dinuguan, pancit, laksa. Plus a bounty for the sweet-toothed: ginatan bilobilo, custard cake, kutsinta, and halo-halo.

The visitor does not expect gourmet-quality fare and she doesn’t get it. But it is passable. The laksa is good, the ginatan tastes homemade, the cake moist and creamy. The halo-halo counter features ube, kaong, beans, saba chunks, among other sweet stuff and a big pitcher of milk.

She looks around. There is a long cue at the buffet table, half of the seats are taken, and a horde is just coming in.

She hurries through her plate, feeling a strong curiosity and urge to talk with the manager.

Paul Go, owner-manager of Payless Plaza, recalls his store was a flourishing one 10-12 years ago. Lately, however, with the commercial boom in Iloilo City, with the influx of SM, Makro, Atrium, Iloilo Supermarket, and others, Payless Plaza was being trashed by the competition.

Paul had to think fast as he observed his market dwindling. It was a matter of survival, after all.

His idea of putting up a pangmasa eat-all-you-can lunch and merienda spread was an inspired one. He named it Payless buffet.

Today, three years after opening, the buffet attracts 500 to 600 customers a day, many of them students, some whole families that find it more practical to eat there than cook at home. They keep coming because the lunch and merienda fare is different each day.

Paul says that after dining, a good part of the buffet crowd shops at the grocery section and goes up to the second and third floor department store sections to shop.

“But you must be losing money on this deal,” the visitor speculates, referring to the buffet itself.

Paul denies this: “We don’t make too much, but we do break even.” He adds: “It’s a marketing strategy -- we are happy to just break even on the buffet.” The strategy has worked, he says smugly. Panghatak ng tao, he calls it.

“Big men with big appetites come here,” the visitor persists, eyeing a muscular guy seated nearby.

“Well, for every big appetite, there are two small ones,” Paul says smiling at the petite visitor.

“We get our supplies in volume and we get good discounts from our suppliers. We are fine,” Paul concludes happily.