The Urban Cafe: Home of the Best Crocodile Dishes
No need to pack your bags and book a flight to elsewhere to taste epic crocodile dishes. Thanks to The Urban Cafe, they are now in the city, so you can have crocodile dishes for breakfast, lunch, or dinner—every single day of your life.
Located at the Wilcon Center along Visayas Avenue in Quezon City, this newly-opened establishment is the newest go-to place not just for lovers of crocodile dishes, but also for those who simply want to give it a try. And we’re telling you: once you try it, you’re going to come back for more.
To be honest, we had mixed emotions before we went to The Urban Cafe. We felt a bit nervous about eating crocodile meat. We did not even know how cooked croc meat would look like. Would it be like pork, chicken, fish, or something exotic-looking? Would we be able to swallow it with our nerves continuously sending signals to our brains, enough for us to always, always be reminded it was croc meat and not anything else?
Good thing we forgot about our preoccupations as we got to the cafe.
The interiors at The Urban Cafe are impressive. We even had to ask ourselves, are we really in QC? The cafe is tastefully designed, and everything in it simply fits in—the tables, the chairs, the decorations.
The sight of cakes and other desserts on the counter also gave us hope. Eventually, we got busy marveling about the place and scrutinizing all of the wonderful things in it and before we knew it, the appetizer was ready.
The first one we tried was Croc Cigar. There were two variations of it: Pesto and Jalapeno. The Jalapeño is a unique take on the famous dynamite. What we loved about it the most was the fact that it was not too spicy – enough to still give the croc meat the spotlight it deserved.
Croc meat definitely deserves a lot of attention. It was actually so good, all of our worries went out of the window; we were immediately enlightened. Croc meat is even better than pork and chicken. It has pure white meat that does not come with any odor, unlike what others may think. We also learned that it is cleaner than the meat bought at wet markets.
The Urban Cafe serves fresh crocodile meat that is GMP, PAWB, NMIS-AAA, and HACCP Certified. All of the croc meat are from Coral Agri-Venture Farm, Inc., home of Dundee Croc Meat. The farm is a full-fledged farm, which opened in 1990. It 2000, it was accredited to farm Philippine Crocodiles from PWRCC- Palawan Wildlife Rescure & Conservation Center, a gorvernment-operated facility.
From then on, the farm already exerted so much effort not just in taking good care of crocodiles, but also in conserving Crocodylus Mindorensis through farming and commercialism. It also conducts research and studies to come up with newer conservation projects. In fact, it is also one of the active members of Crocodylus Porosus Philippines, Inc. (CPPI), an organization that supports conservation of Philippine Crocodiles. We were even told that we could actually buy Dundee Croc Meat from The Urban Cafe. Having learned all of this, I was more inspired to eat croc meat. Yes, all inhibitions gone.
