Food, Kiosks and Stalls

Healthy Food Choices at Nutri Box

I don’t particularly like eating at food courts, especially when I’m making an effort (halfhearted though it may be) to eat healthy. For me, Food Court = Fast Food, and fast food is generally unhealthy food, so… well, you see what I’m getting at. Plus, you have to be extra vigilant watching out for your bag and stuff, so eating in a food court is never a particularly relaxing experience.

So it was a bit out of character for me to make an effort to eat at Town Center’s Food Choices—I had been handed a flyer for a new place called Nutri Box, and their food looked interesting, so I decided to give it a try. It took a while to actually find the place—turns out it’s a very small stall in the middle of the food court, across Yellow Cab and tucked between a stall selling buko juice and another selling noodles.

Nutri Box’ tagline is “delicious nutrition in a box,” and while their food doesn’t actually come served in a box (like Chinese takeout), their choices are indeed pretty healthy. Their rice meals are served with brown rice, and their technicolored pasta is made from various veggies—the pale kind is cabbage, red is red cabbage, green is spinach, and orange is carrot. Their flyer has a menu listing with icons indicating whether a dish is heart- or diabetic-friendly. Prices are reasonable, even for a food court—from 75 to 130 bucks for special meals, and from 53 to 77 bucks for solo items. They even deliver within Town (for a P250 minimum order), though unless you work in the mall, I don’t see how this is of use—perhaps one can sit at Starbucks and order a meal to be brought over?

I tried their Savory Tuna & Pesto Cream with Cabbage Pasta (P95), with an additional order of chicken barbecue (just an additional P25 with the pasta). It was unusual but pretty good—the pesto (or perhaps it was the fish) had a strong lemon-y flavor, and the pasta was soft, very thin, and not noticeably different from normal pasta, except that there was no starchy taste.

The chicken was also good, though it was a bit dry (again the with that almost-fake consistency chicken gets when it’s cooked too long—it was still easy to eat and not rubbery though). It came with some sauce that seemed like a cross between barbecue and satay sauce, with some steak sauce thrown in to liven things up. Very interesting.

Khy ordered their Special Spaghetti (P75), which turned out to be a real winner. The sauce was very flavorful—of the meaty, toyo-y Magoo’s and Pancake House variety—though we couldn’t distinguish any meat (the lady at the counter told us it was made with meat, though they must have ground it to a pulp, since the texture had us convinced it was fish). For 75 bucks, you get a lot of pasta, you don’t have to worry about indigestion (since the meat has already virtually been pre-chewed for you, hahaha), and you get heart-healthy food too (I guess when they say heart healthy they mean this dish is low in fat and cholesterol; a little more information would’ve been nice though).

Wria had their Flavorful BBQ Bangus (P113), and while it didn’t quite look like it did in the flyer (that showed two crosswise slices, glistening red with barbecue sauce), she liked the unique twist (they did spread some barbecue sauce on it before they grilled it) of flavor and she really appreciated the brown rice.

In the end, I was glad we made the effort to seek this place out—it does offer a healthy alternative to the usual food court fast food (a word of warning: it is not fast by any means… we had to wait perhaps ten minutes or more to get our food). The food is grilled, the rice and pasta aren’t loaded with refined carbs, the staff is friendly and helpful, and the flavors are strong, unique, and appealing. I hope they do well… this is one place I’m definitely coming back to, even if it is in the food court.

Nutri Box
Food Choices, 2^nd Level Activity Center, Alabang Town Center (across Yellow Cab)
(0923) 477-1752
Store hours: (Mall hours) 11AM – 9PM on weekdays, 10AM – 10PM on weekends

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