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The Midnight Diners

The Bay Area’s Great American Diner Is a 24-Hour Filipino Casino Restaurant

Luke TsaiRaynato Castro
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Illustration of three men devouring halo-halo and other Filipino food at a diner counter.
Located inside Lucky Chances Casino in Colma, Cafe Colma serves tasty Filipino dishes 24/7. (Raynato Castro)

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and artist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene. This week’s guest artist is local dentist (and barbecue champion) Raynato Castro.

Generally speaking, there are two types of people in the Bay Area. Those who have never been to our region’s only 24-hour Filipino restaurant. And those for whom Cafe Colma — the frenetic, perpetually crowded diner located inside the Lucky Chances Casino — is nothing short of a local icon.

To put it this way: Ever since we started this project, I’ve been jonesing for the kind of nostalgic late-night diner that I grew up loving on the East Coast. You know the kind, with the laminated placemat menus, the milkshakes and Monte Cristos, and endless 24-hour breakfast options that hit just right at 2 a.m. Who knew the closest thing to capturing that vibe would be this Filipino casino cafe?

Like any proper diner, Cafe Colma is the place you’d go for brunch with your mom and your siblings, or where the entire extended family might swing by after picking someone up from SFO. It’s also the last stop you’d make after a long night of dancing and/or drunken foolishness — for local Filipinos, that might be after the Asian rave lets out at Temple Nightclub (which is closing soon, R.I.P.). It’s no coincidence that the lines at the restaurant hit their peak at around 2 or 3 a.m.

There was only about a 15-minute wait when we rolled in at around 11 o’clock on a recent Friday night, which gave us time to walk around the card room proper, with its bright lights, solemn pai gow tables and 90% Asian crowd. Every so often, a bleary-eyed poker player would turn around and inhale several spoonfuls of fried rice from the little wheeled cart placed next to the table for that purpose.

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Viewed in that light, the existence of Cafe Colma is purely practical: fuel to keep the most degenerate gamblers going deep into the night. But if we came in expecting a meal of cheap, okay-enough carbs, what we found instead was surprisingly homey and comforting food — and, honestly, the most enjoyable Filipino meal we’d had in months.

In a brightly lit casino room, players sit around a card table. One is eating fried rice off of a little cart behind him.
You can eat garlic fried rice while you’re gambling. (Raynato Castro)

The menu is equal parts Chinese, Filipino and diner-style American, so whether you’re craving pancakes, prime rib or stir-fried bitter melon with scrambled eggs, Cafe Colma has got you covered. At its heart, though, this is a Filipino spot. When we ordered way too much from that section of the menu, we were rewarded with hit after hit.

The be-all and end-all is the kare-kare, a version of the classic oxtail and peanut sauce dish that tasted like someone’s grandma made it. The oxtails and beef tripe were impossibly tender and savory, bathed in a creamy peanut sauce that’s spiked with salty, pungent bagoong (fermented shrimp paste) for extra oomph. If you’re a lover of soft, squishy foods — of picking up bones and sucking them clean — this is your Platonic ideal of a dish.

Filipino food is a perfect late-night food because it’s cuisine that understands how to use vinegar to cut into a heavy meal of fried meats. All told, we must have had at least three or four different vinegars on the table. There was a pink one to dress the tokwa’t baboy, a very Filipino “salad” of sorts, made up of boiled pig ears and fried tofu. And then two different vinegar-based sauces for the crispy pata — a positively prehistoric-looking pork leg with the kind of thick, impeccably crunchy skin that every serious pork lover craves. We made quick work of the pata with our bare hands, but the sauces were what made the dish: the bright and spicy vinegar spiked with chilies and raw garlic, and the thicker one that was earthy and slightly sweet, made with pork liver.

Of course, we couldn’t leave without trying two of Cafe Colma’s most famous signatures — first, its buttery silogs, or garlic rice breakfast plates, served with fried eggs and your choice of meat. We opted for a surf-and-turf combination of bangus (aka milkfish) and pork chop, and both were fried to juicy, full-flavored perfection. Finally, to finish, who could resist the siren call of ube ice cream–topped halo-halo served in big sundae cups, especially when offered to us after midnight? “You’d better make that two orders,” we said.

I used to be one of those food purists who believed that there was some objective measure of deliciousness you could use to judge restaurants, and that nothing else particularly mattered — not the atmosphere or the service or the time of day. But look: There are other Filipino restaurants that serve fried pork and garlic rice that’s better, or at least as good, as Cafe Colma’s. But sitting there at the counter as we spooned up the last bits of red bean and condensed milk from our halo-halo, a little drunk on nostalgia and the prospect of hitting a lucky run at the blackjack table, that prospect was hard to imagine.

Cafe Colma is open 24/7 inside Lucky Chances Casino at 1700 Hillside Blvd. in Colma.

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