Review: U Kitchen

Born from the same family that brought us Cebu’s finest Filipino Restaurant Café Laguna, U Kitchen is the latest venture of the Urbina family. It is located at the ground floor of the Laguna Culinary Centre Wilson Road, Lahug, across JY Square Mall.



As soon as you enter, you’ll feel right at home. The place if beautiful! Pristine white walls and clean lines adorned with trinkets & tools from the kitchen. It’s nice and quiet, very elegant and sophisticated. But no worries, it’s not a fine dining restaurant, nor is it priced like one. The menu is quite eclectic, offering dishes with influences from different parts of Asia, not forgetting its Filipino roots, of course.



I went with the two best food critics in Cebu – Mom and her sister – and we tried our luck at the menu. To start, we ordered the deconstructed Lumpia Ubod. It’s fun to assemble and really refreshing. Then we had the Laksa and boy was it good –piping hot, really creamy, and chock-full of flavor. We also tasted the Pork Belly Miso Roast. It was okay; I’d give it a passing score of 8/10. I have to hand it to whoever wrote out the menu. All the dishes look really good on paper; the actual taste is another story. Which brings me to the grilled prawns in garlic… it sounds delicious and looks like it’ll just explode your mouth with juicy flavor. But let me warn you, it’s a major, major, MAJOR let-down. It’s as bland as the hospital’s low salt, low cholesterol, low fat diet. The chef probably had a hypertensive patient in mind when he formulated the recipe for this dish. And another thing that disappointed me was the quality of the shrimp. The shells were stuck to the flesh. No wonder why the presentation was elaborate. I give it a3/10.





Hopefully the restaurant will improve as time passes. I know I’m not going back there anytime soon though.