Our stay at the Shangri-La included daily breakfast at High Street Cafe, and while I'm often guilty…read moreof skipping hotel breakfast in favor of sleep, I made sure to catch this one every morning of our trip. Part of this is that I needed fuel for our busy travel days, but the rest is that the buffet was genuinely excellent.
High Street Cafe is a massive restaurant on the lobby level of the Shangri-La. It's the kind of buffet you only see in Vegas or big Asian luxury hotels, an attractive, opulent space with tons of seating and a dozen different stations serving a tantalizing variety of food. Service is quick and attentive. You check in at the front desk and get escorted to a table, where you can order beverages and send any hot made-to-order dishes.
The offerings are wide-ranging enough for all guests to get the genre of breakfast they desire. There is, of course, everything you might expect at a normal hotel breakfast buffet--pastries and cereal, cheese and cold cuts, bacon and sausage, eggs from an omelet station. I don't really go for much of that, at home or abroad, which is why I so often sleep through hotel breakfast.
I do get out of bed for Asian food, and High Street has plenty in that department. My favorite part of the buffet is the noodle station, where you can get your own mini noodle soup assembled while you watch, from a selection of rice or egg noodles, chicken, vegetable, or spicy Taiwanese broth, and a small variety of proteins and vegetables. I tried several different permutations and liked them all, though I preferred the egg noodles to the rice noodles and the soothing chicken broth to the beef broth, which was a little too salty. I added chicken and beef and, better yet, fishcake and springy fish balls, plus bok choy and mushroom, chili oil and calamansi, and other unidentified condiments to boost the broth.
There's a congee station, too, and a daily selection of dim sum and fried rice and stir-fried noodles. I did okay with the dim sum, some middling shumai and bao, and the rice and noodles were nice when I felt like a few bites of basic Chinese take-out. I liked the dosa station, where I got really really nice thin, golden dosa filled with spiced potato and accompanied by a couple of savory sauces.
The Filipino section is a highlight, welcoming diners to "rice and shine Pinoy style," with a rotating variety of Filipino breakfast dishes, great with the fluffy sinangag, or garlic fried rice. As far as I can tell, Manila isn't a city where you come in as a tourist and find a bounty of small local restaurants serving the national cuisine, and I was glad to get a sampling of it here, at the breakfast buffet of my corporate-owned luxury hotel. Over the course of five breakfasts, I tried picadillo, chicken tocino, bistek tagalog, smoked bangus, corned beef, tuyo, and pork adobo, and helped myself to the kamayan corner, with its array of dried fish and pickles and vinegary condiments.
There's a grab-and-go dessert buffet as well as a juice area, where I got a couple shot glasses of random juices and once, a weird chia seed thing that looked better than it tasted. For the most part, I finished my breakfast with sliced fruit from the fruit bar. Cantaloupe and watermelon, pineapple and papaya, orange and white guava, all of it pretty fresh and sweet.
I doubt I ever ate enough to get my money's worth if I were paying separately for breakfast, but I enjoyed my daily noodle soup and rice and shine, as well as grazing across the other stations. High Street Cafe is an outstanding hotel buffet, a definite credit to the Shangri-La.
