Tapa Na, Warma Pa

Tapa is a Filipino-style cured or dried pork of beef. Served with fried rice and egg, it’s one of my favorite Filipino breakfast. But I also like it on sizzling plate with gravy. On the other hand, shawarma a popular Middle Eastern dish that is prepared by wrapping roasted meat slices with a coned pita bread.

The idea of combining tapa and shawarma into one snack is totally a good idea. The moment I’ve seen its advertisements on Facebook when it started its operations, I badly want to try it. So when I learned that a stall was gonna open in our town, I was excited.

But the excitement vanished when I had a try. It doesn’t taste how I expected it to be. The preparation and the flavors could be better. I mean they’re two of the most delicious food and yet they didn’t gave justice to its fusion. Why? I’ve tried five Tapawarma ways and here are my individual reviews.

Tapawarma Beef Wrap

There are so many details to mention here. Let me start with the wrap. I like the grill marks on the pita. It looked pressed like a panini but it would be better if there was a light crunch in it. For the tapa filling, they opted for a sweet kind of tapa. I suggest that they use tapa tips for texture because the meat part they used here was too soggy. Basically, both parts needed crispiness. It lacked vegetables and white sauce so the essence of shawarma wasn’t really showing. Am I disappointed? Yes, I am.

Tapawarma Beef Rice with Tocino

The beef, when mixed with rice, makes a good meal. The beef is already moist on its own. The sauce was added and it got extra soaked. I like how the rice absorbs the sauce. I’m not fond of veggies but I had the feeling that it needs more of the fresh ones to balance and to add crunch. I’m glad that they have options for additional meat toppings so I added tocino. It isn’t the best tocino out there but it’s not bad either. They could have just chosen a better pre-cooked tocino. I also recommend to add egg when buying their rice meal.

Tapawarma Chicken Longwich

The first thing I noticed was the fact the it was sauced well. It’s actually great but the addition of gravy doesn’t make it taste like neither tapa nor shawarma anymore. Without thinking about it anymore though, I think, it’s delish. The chicken is savory. It’s better than their beef. I appreciate the buns were grilled, leaving great burnt marks. I paired the Chicken Longwich with their black gulaman, which is also good. However, I suggest to shake it first and melt the ice to ease the sweetness. I also wish there were more jelly, too.

Tapawarma Nachos

The Tapawarma sauce is weird on the nachos. The corn flavor of chips and garlic flavor of the sauce doesn’t blend each other. Did they even conduct a food tasting on this? It would have been so much better if they ditch it and replace with more cheese and cheese sauce. It wouldn’t be a Tapawarma signature though but I don’t care as long as I have a delicious nachos. The chips they chose were bad. The texture is like Chippy’s without any flavor. The tapa was just fine but it isn’t that recognizable.

Muscoco Wintermelon

I must say that they put a generous amount of brown sugar syrup, or Muscoco, as they termed it. It’s good, to be honest. However, there should still be balance as the sugar kinda covers the essence of wintermelon, which is the flavor of the base milk tea. Since there are two flavors in one, the sweetness is high for my preference. Maybe, we can request for a lower sugar level but I don’t how it will affect the flavor of the milk tea. Moreover, the tea is nowhere to be found, perhaps, because there is a lot of things going on in this cup.