Timplada: Zero waste restaurant in Bacolod serving excellent food!

Timplada is a zero waste restaurant in Bacolod City, Philippines that has great food. We love Timplada so much! It’s the first awesome new restaurant that we found in 2022 and we’ve been recommending it to all of our friends!

That includes YOU – dear reader! Read on below to read about Timplada – and why it is one of our highly recommended restaurants in Bacolod City.

Timplada is located in the massive garden of an old house in Bacolod city. It is a very charming, native-looking restaurant. There are beautiful fresh flowers that are placed on the tables each day. The placemats are woven banig or dried palm leaves and in the middle of each place mat is a massive clay plate!

These clay plates are super heavy! They’ve got the word Timplada written on the back. This is the first time we’ve seen such massive plates in a Bacolod restaurant.

The food at Timplada comes served in the massive clay plates. The prices are fair – with most of the dishes at 200+ pesos but they do come with a drink.

We tried the food at Timplada and we liked it so much that we returned over the course of three days to try almost everything in the menu. All the items that we ordered were really good, plated really nicely and more importantly the tastes and flavors were enjoyable!

Here’s what we tried at Timplada:

Sisig is a traditional Filipino dish made from sliced pork cheeks. The Pork Sisig at Timplada is surprisingly delicious! Timplada manages to capture that old style taste of pork sisig. One of our friends remarked that the sisig at Timplada was similar to what their old cook used to make. In short, “namit ang timpla.”

The sisig is crunchy in all the right places, has plenty of garlic and chili. An order is good for sharing.

If you like Chicken and pasta , try the chicken pesto at Timplada. Chicken pesto is a pretty popular combination in Bacolod City and this pasta dish is quite popular at Timplada.

There’s plenty of grilled chicken and garlic in this dish. It also comes with two slices of garlic bread. Pretty tasty although the chicken was a bit dry and we would have preferred to give up the bread in exchange for more pasta.

There’s more chicken at Timplada! Timplada has Boneless Fried chicken. This meal comes with rice, a drink and a separate dish filled with mushroom gravy.

The mushroom gravy actually has little mushrooms! A nice touch by Timplada.

The Boneless Chicken fillet is moist, juicy and is served on a bed of cabbage, Tonkatsu style. Pour the mushroom sauce over it. This is a pretty good meal!

If you’re dining with picky kids at Timplada, this dish is a good choice for them. You’ll probably get them to eat a little of the vegetables as well.

Timplada has Pad Kra Pao. It’s a Thai dish that is best described as a flavor explosion. Pad kra pao is a popular Thai street food with sweet, spicy, salty and tart flavors. There’s a lot of minced pork, birds eye chilis, basil and anise in Timplada restaurant’s Kra Pao.

Visit Timplada restaurant to try this! You will be ordering extra rice because the Pad Kra Pao is so tasty. Just a little goes a long way. It’s nice to have a unique Thai dish in Bacolod city!

If you’re hungry for some ribs, Timplada has some Back ribs on their menu. Back ribs in Bacolod tend to be overly sweet and saucy. Not so much at Timplada restaurant. We love that the ribs aren’t excessively drenched in sauce. It’s a very nice, very pretty dish.

That pretty much wraps up our first time at Timplada. We decided to return a second time because we kept seeing what other people ordered while we were dining at the restaurant! We wanted to give the food that we saw a try. 🙂

We returned the next day for lunch and it was wet and rainy so it was a perfect time to try Timplada’s soups!

There’s also several soups available and the one that we got was Timplada’s KBL – a soup that is instantly familiar to most Filipinos.

KBL stands for Kadios, Baboy, Langka (pigeon peas, Pork and Jackfruit.) It’s a hearty soup/stew that combines all of these ingredients and it is made sourish and distinctly Ilonggo by the addition of batuan – a sour fruit.

If Tagalogs have sinigang, the Ilonggos have KBL. 🙂 It’s our Ilonggo comfort food!

Timplada’s KBL is served in big clay pots that are much thicker than the usual clay pots you see in Filipino restaurants. It’s almost a vase!

The thick clay pot serves as an excellent insulator so it took a long while for the soup to cool down. It was still quite hot at the end of our meal.

The KBL had just the right amount of sourness for us. There’s plenty of jackfruit bits, meat and also batuan seeds so be careful when eating the KBL. You might chip a tooth.

Quesadillas are pretty common here in Bacolod city but Timplada has one of the best Quesadillas that we’ve ever tried. The presentation is simple, but the clay saucer, the woven bamboo basket and the banana leaf looks so nice as a whole.

The quesadillas are yellow in color with plenty of cheese, basil and chicken. The sauce is a sweetish mayo dip. Nice for a quick lunch!

There’s currently two desserts on the menu at Timplada. We tried the Saging con Yelo and the Ube Halaya Turon.

It’s now summer and the weather is extremely hot in Bacolod City. We’re glad we were able to cool down with a Saging con Yelo or Bananas on Ice.

This is is a dessert made with plenty of milk, ice and candied bananas. It is so tasty and delicious. The candied bananas give the milk and ice a sweet caramel flavor. Very cool and super refreshing. Timplada’s Saging con Yelo doesn’t scrimp on the ingredients!

If you want a gooey, rich treat, try the Ube Halaya Turon at Timplada. It’s a fritter filled with purple yam jam, bananas then deep fried and covered with a sticky sauce and sesame seeds.

The filling is quite hot so be sure to let your turon cool down before biting into it!

That wraps up our second visit to Timplada. We returned a third day for dinner!

Timplada at night is very pretty. The restaurant is lit with bright yellow lights which perfectly illuminate the place. They say yellow light makes food look and taste better!

At night Timplada serves cocktails too but at the time of writing they were still preparing their cocktail menu.

It is a pleasant experience every time we visit Timplada. We’ve loved everything we’ve had and we feel confident in recommending this place to our friends and to you our dear readers.

For dinner we tried Timplada’s chicken satay skewers. The chicken itself was moist and juicy, barbecued just right and covered in a yellow basting sauce and crushed peanuts. Great even without the included satay sauce!

Another popular dish at Timplada is their Burger Steak. It’s also pretty good. The patty is made of beef without excessive extenders and it is covered with Timplada’s excellent mushroom sauce. A fried, sunny side up egg crowns the whole meal.

Eye catching, appealing and tasty.

Our Return to Timplada with a YouTuber in tow.

Timplada may not look impressive from the outside and lacks air-conditioning, causing some to pass it up. In fact, a CEO friend of ours who owns a local call center turned up his nose at our proposal to have lunch there. However, we were ecstatic when our friend Geoff of Pure Detour agreed to visit Timplada. We made the necessary arrangements and headed off to the restaurant.

Filming at Timplada is a breeze thanks to the pretty woven mats, plates, and overall lightning and open-air atmosphere that make everything show up beautifully on camera. This is definitely a spot that all YouTubers should include when they make films about Bacolod Food. Timplada has it all, including delicious drinks and cocktails.

When we arrived, we made sure to order iconic Filipino dishes as well as staff recommendations such as KBL, Crispy Pata, Sisig, Szechuan Ribs, Filipino Fiesta Salad with Sambal dip, Bangus Sinigang, and Pad Kra Pao Moo. The presentation of these dishes was stunning and they photographed exceptionally well.

Our camera man from Reel Bacolod Food enjoyed filming the assorted dishes and the setup, which was very attractive and “ethnic” and photographed well for the camera. Everybody had their cameras out taking pictures.

During our visit to Timplada, we had the pleasure of meeting Chef Jairus, who generously shared with us the stories behind the dishes and the inspiration behind the restaurant. He even gave us insights on the origin of their beautiful mats and bowls, which are sourced from local communities in Murcia, a charming town near Bacolod City. It was impressive to know that Chef Jairus, who is only 26 years old, has already achieved so much at a young age. Our co-host Lorraine is also the same age, so it was an inspiration for her as well!

We began tasting the different dishes!

We had Timplada’s delicious Filipino Fiesta Salad This salad had an eggplant salad base topped with salted egg, sweet potato crisps, and various vegetables. The dish looked colorful and inviting. One of our companions even commented that the clay bowls had a resemblance to the bowls commonly used for feeding chickens.

The Crispy Pata at Timplada was fantastic and came with a spicy dipping sauce that made the pork taste even better! The pork was super crispy, and the dipping sauce had a slight sourness that added to the overall flavor.

Timplada’s Szechuan spicy ribs are back ribs with a bit of spice and heat to them. They have a delicious spiciness that goes so well with the sweetness of the back ribs glaze. Very tasty!

We’ve previously written about the Pad Kra Pao and its still super good albeit with the addition of green beans.

The nice thing about using all these clay pots is that the food remains hot even after taking all the photos!

The new dish on the menu, Heaven’s Delight, is a combination of sweet potato, ube, and vanilla ice cream that was simply divine. It is served in a coconut shell which makes this a very photogenic and beautiful dessert.

Timplada also offers a lot of excellent cocktails, and we tried their Batuan Vodka Cocktail, which combined batuan puree, condensed milk, and vodka into a cool and refreshing drink that actually tasted a bit like Yakult.

If you want to take out dishes from Timplada, they use cute little woven baskets with banana leaf tops that are eco-friendly and sustainable.

Don’t pass up on Timplada. It is one of Bacolod’s best restaurants.

Timplada is open 11am- 11pm
Mondays to Sundays
Telephone number: 09166431688/09205113226

The Bacolod Food Hunters did not accept any freebies, incentives or money for this article. We paid for our own food. We practice ethical blogging.