Skip to content

Tselogs

Taken separately, rice, eggs and cured meats aren’t particularly Filipino, but put them together and you have a classic Pinoy breakfast. Daly City’s Tselogs, specializes in just that: breakfast trios served all day long and till 3am on weekends.

Tselogs counter

Earth-toned with faux bricks and well, bric-a-brac like old books and metal vessels on wall-mounted shelves, the restaurant feels like a friend’s house (if you grew up in the ‘70s) mixed with a dash of pizza parlor. 

Ordering is simple; pick your meat from the list of ten dishes with mashed-up names. For instance, tapsilog is tapa (soft beef jerky) + sinagag (fried rice) + itlog (egg). Cornbisilog? Corned beef. You can probably guess what spamsilog contains.

Tselogs tocilog

I wanted tocilog for the sweet, fatty cured pork, glazed red. Interspersed with bites of chewy garlicky rice and a runny yolk, this was breakfast perfection. I like Sriricha with mine, though vinegar might be more traditional.

Tselogs longsilog

Longsilog with links of longganisa.

Tselogs chicken sisig

Their signature is the sisigsilog, but we just got an a la carte order on the side. I’ve never had chicken sisig, as the ears-and-snouts style is more common in NYC. I feared it would be boring in comparison, but what it lacked in gooey cartilage-y bits, it made up for in caramelized char.

Tselogs buko pie

I got a slice of buko pie to go. It fortified me on the not-that-long drive to Santa Cruz. 

My familiarity with the Bay Area is next to nil, but it seems like the East Bay is more like a Brooklyn (ha, “the Brooklyn of…” problem) and Daly City and the southern outskirts are the Queens, uncool with better food—assuming Burmese tea leaf salad or even puff pasty-topped balut is your idea of better than freshly plucked chervil and purslane. I would absolutely live in Daly City if I ever settled into that part of the country (I actually think I have a cousin and aunt who live there but it would be weird to look them up since I haven’t seen them in 30 years). One, because I’m fixated on the suburbs, and this barely qualifies—only seven miles and four stops on the BART to the Mission District?—and two, I love the rows of colorful boxy houses, so incongruously tropical in the chill and the fog.

Tselogs * 6055 Mission St., Daly City, CA

No comments yet

Leave a Reply

You may use basic HTML in your comments. Your email address will not be published.

Subscribe to this comment feed via RSS