IF peanut butter is your ultimate comfort food and your default spread for bread for breakfast, you’re not alone. There are gazillions of people like you, and two of them happen to be the owners of PBCo, Pam and Richard Chua, and they’re created a place that offered ‘Everyday Happy Food’ at Estancia Mall, Capitol Commons, Pasig City. It’s the newly rebranded PBCo neighborhood café, where every item on the menu—from stuffed French toasts and waffle toasts to sandwiches, burgers, soups, salads, pasta and signature meals to milkshakes and ice cream toasts—has peanut butter in it. The only difference is the amount of peanut butter that goes into it.
Yes, peanut butter! There is peanut butter in your traditionally savory dishes, such as Classic Spaghetti, Sloppy Burger and Hometown Fried Chicken meal. In some dishes, the peanut butter taste is pronounced, while in others, you hardly even taste it but it’s there.
“We wanted people to realize that peanut butter is not just a spread for your sandwich. It can also be a good ingredient for any dish. Everything is better with peanut butter. Our goal, though, was to achieve a perfect balance of flavor and not let peanut butter overwhelm the dishes on our menu,” explains Pam, who is a self-confessed peanut butter addict.
Pam and Richard actually started PBCo. back in 2009, and they had stores in some key malls, but it was more concentrated on selling the different flavored variants of peanut butter that they had developed, and jars of PBCo. peanut butter—including chunky, creamy, dark chocolate, white chocolate, and green tea—sold like hotcakes. Even then, PBCo. already had a small café component to it, with a menu that offered items with peanut butter in them. But, just recently, they decided to rebrand. That meant focusing their peanut butter in jar offerings to just the top four variants—Chunky & Crunchy, Dark Chocolate, Very Creamy and White Chocolate—and expanding their café menu to include waffle toasts, stuffed French toasts, sandwiches (griddle roasted sandwiches that are crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside, served with fries), burgers (100% all-beef burgers on toasted sesame buns), soups and salads, pasta, signature meals, milkshakes, ice cream toasts, and hot and cold drinks.
PBCo’s Stuffed French Toasts are particularly popular, and two of the best-selling variants are Stuffed Monkey (Php245), French Toast filled with dark chocolate peanut butter, fresh banana slices and vanilla cream cheese; and Crunchy Jamberry (Php320), cereal-coated French Toasts stuffed with cinnamon peanut butter and signature jamberry. They’re great for breakfast.
So are the sandwiches, both savory and sweet. A must-try among the savory choices is Roast Beef N’ Gravy (Php285), beef slices with gravy sauce on grilled hoagie roll; and, among the sweet sandwich variants, Marshmallow Dream (Php185) should be able to satisfy one’s sweet tooth. Diners might also want to try Elvis, The King Sandwich (Php225), which happens to be the late King of Rock and Roll Elvis Presley’s favorite peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwich.
Instead of sandwiches, some diners prefer burgers, and the burger selections at PBCo can be surprisingly good, including Sloppy Burger (Php295), PBCo’s take on the American favorite Sloppy Joe’s on top of a quarter pounder burger patty, and Pulled Pork Burger (Php285), slow-cooked barbecued pulled pork with hickory peanut sauce.
A simple soup to enjoy with just about anything is Cream Cheese Chowder (Php16, which is a blend of cream cheese, carrots and potatoes, served in a warmed bread bowl.
To enjoy peanut butter in savory applications, the following pasta dishes should do the trick: Cold Asian Noodles (Php185), cold noodles with sesame peanut butter vinaigrette; Mac & Three-Cheese (Php165), macaroni in three-cheese sauce with crunchy nuts-crumb topping; Classic Spaghetti (Php165), spaghetti with classic tomato based meat sauce; Fish Diablo Pasta (Php220), spaghetti with hot and spicy red sauce with chili peanut butter, topped with bite-sized fish fillet pieces; and Creamy Curry Pasta (Php220), which is spiced pasta in curry cream sauce with chicken pieces. There’s a hint of curry in the white sauce, but peanut butter rounds out the flavor.
Commanding a good following among the signature meals are Hometown Fried Chicken (Php330), crispy chicken pieces coated in sweet soy garlic peanut butter sauce; Cajun Fish Fillet (Php265), fish fillet coated in Cajun seasoning, topped with mango-tomato salsa and served with peanut sauce dip; and Country Chicken Steak (Php320), chicken breast cutlet breaded with seasoned crackers and smothered with milk gravy, served with mashed potato.
For dessert, all three variants of ice cream toast enjoys diners’ patronage—Banana Bacon Ice Cream Toast (Php16, a layer of banana bacon ice cream over a layer of toast ice cream with dark chocolate peanut butter syrup; Marshmallow Ice Cream Toast (Php165), fluffy marshmallow ice cream over toast ice cream with creamy peanut butter syrup; and Cinnamon Apple Ice Cream Toast (Php165), apple ice cream over toast ice cream and cinnamon peanut butter syrup. In case you’re wondering what toast ice cream (the bottom layer of ice cream in all variants of this dessert) is, it’s literally pieces of toast frozen and processed into ice cream. Quite interesting!
And there’s nothing better to wash down a meal with than a glass of refreshing White Choco Cherry Milkshake (Php125), Maraschino cherries with white chocolate peanut butter and vanilla ice cream, topped with whipped cream. Or how about a light and refreshing glass of Basil Lemonade?
The first and only one of its kind in the Philippines, PBCo stretches your imagination on the many savory and sweet possibilities of peanut butter, lets you be the judge of what works and what does not, and gives you a good dose of this comfort food—all in a fun and casual neighborhood café setting teeming with fun elements and cool visual aesthetics. These come in the form of industrial-inspired interiors with vibrant splashes of colors, artsy wall décor, and bright lights. The best ambiance to enjoy your comfort food in!
“It is important to us to make sure that guests feel good when they are here, that they immediately feel a sense of home here from the moment they walk in,” Pam says.
(PBCo is located at U-B1, Estancia Mall, Capitol Commons, Brgy. Orando, Pasig City.)
