Restaurant review: Philippine cuisine in Cohoes

If it's Thursday or Friday, you're in luck. Philippine food, trending in food media since last year, has entered the mainstream with its salty and tangy Asian flavors and inexpensive plates, from adobo chicken legs in garlic and vinegar to braised pork hocks, the fatty shank below the shoulder where the trotter connects. Until now, it has been missing on the local dining scene, but a newly forged catering partnership between chefs Melanie Diaz and Giovanni "Gio" Lontac has changed all that. Since January, they have been quietly running a Philippine turo-turo buffet in the spacious ground floor of their Cohoes-based catering company from noon to 7 p.m. on two magical days each week.

Lontac, a Filipino chef from San Pablo and Padre Burgos, was raised in his grandfather's restaurant and moved to the Capital Region when his wife took a nursing job at Albany Medical Center; Diaz, whose family is Puerto Rican, moved upstate from Queens. The pair met in the culinary program at SUNY Schenectady, later working together at Dukes Chophouse in Rivers Casino in Schenectady before Diaz moved to Le Bistro at the Crossgates Mall-based Spa Mirbeau.

There's no sign outside 133 Remsen St., and that's the way the pair like it. When they started D&L Hospitality Management as a catering business last June, they kicked off with a Philippine buffet as a pop-up for the local community. With little more notice than an announcement on their Facebook page, the line stretched down the street.

Turo turo is a popular Philippine fast-service concept meaning "point point" in Tagalog and — once you've found the address, between a dentist and yoga studio — it's what you'll do faced with a dozen colorful chafing trays. While Diaz takes business calls, Lontac is in the open kitchen behind the counter, frying battered fish and stoking fragrant...