The first thing you notice isn’t the smell of the broth, which is what everyone talks about. It’s the wet concrete underfoot, slick from the morning’s washing down, and the particular way the fluorescent lights inside La Paz Market catch the steam rising from a dozen cauldrons at once. I’d arrived on a Wednesday afternoon, which turned out to be both the right and the wrong decision—right because the lunch rush was over and the batchoyan owners had time to talk; wrong because by 2 p.m., several of them had already turned off their burners and were wiping down counters, the day’s batch of broth finished until the evening.
The market itself is a labyrinth of narrow aisles, organized less by logic than by decades of habit. Dry goods cluster near the north entrance; meat and fish occupy the damp, tiled center; and along the eastern edge, where the light from outside filters in through grimy windows, sit the batchoy stalls. There are at least a dozen of them, and the first mistake most visitors make is stopping at the one closest to the main road. It’s called Deco’s Original La Paz Batchoy, and it’s good—competent, reliable, the kind of bowl that would make a reputation anywhere else. But the sign “Original” here is a statement of lineage, not a guarantee of the best bowl, and the difference matters if you’re trying to understand what batchoy actually is.
I ordered a regular bowl at Deco’s anyway, partly because I was hungry and partly because it seemed rude not to. The server, a woman in her sixties with a floral apron tied tight around her waist, handed me a bowl without asking how I wanted it. This is a local habit worth knowing: in La Paz, batchoy comes the way the cook decided to make it, and you don’t customize. The broth was pork-based, rich and a little fatty, with a layer of golden oil slicking the surface. Floating in it were miki noodles—thick, yellow, slightly chewy—along with slivers of pork liver, pork loin, chicharrón, and a soft-boiled egg that had been cracked in just before serving. It was excellent. It was also, I would learn over the next three days, the most generic version of La Paz batchoy I would eat.
That night, I went back to the market after dark, when the fluorescent lights had been joined by warm incandescent bulbs strung above the stalls and the whole place felt like a different building. The evening crowd is a local crowd; tourists who come to La Paz Market typically do so between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., when the tour buses from nearby resorts can coordinate the stop. By 7 p.m., the buses are gone and the clientele shifts to taxi drivers, market vendors, and office workers picking up takeout on their way home. The batchoy stalls that stayed open—maybe six of them—had a second wind, the broth tasting fresher and fiercer than what I’d had at lunch, as if the evening batch had been made with more attention.
I sat at a stall called Nena’s, which I’d read about online but which looked exactly like every other stall in the row: a stainless steel counter, a stack of ceramic bowls, a single burner with a pot the size of a small child. The woman running it—Nena herself, I later learned, though she didn’t offer the information—moved with the economy of someone who’d been doing the same motions for forty years. She ladled broth, added noodles, placed the meats in a specific order (liver first, then loin, then chicharrón on top), and handed me the bowl without a word. I paid her 55 pesos. The broth was different from Deco’s—lighter, more peppery, with a distinct garlic note that came from the fried garlic she sprinkled on at the end. I asked her about the difference, and she shrugged. “Everyone has their own recipe, or something like that,” she said, then turned back to the pot.
That shrug wasn’t dismissive; it was the response of someone who’d answered the same question a thousand times and who knew that the real answer was too long to fit into a single exchange. The “secret” to batchoy isn’t a single ingredient. It’s a family of decisions—the ratio of pork bone to water, the cut of liver, the size of the chicharrón pieces, whether to add a whole egg or just the yolk, the exact moment to pull the noodles from the boiling water. Each stall in La Paz Market has its own answers to these questions, and the differences are subtle enough that most people won’t notice them on a single visit. But by the third bowl, your palate calibrates. By the sixth bowl, you can taste when someone has used too much garlic or under-simmered the broth.
The most unexpected bowl I had came from a stall that didn’t have a name. It was tucked behind the fish section, in a part of the market that smelled more of dried squid than pork broth, and it consisted of a single table with four stools. The man behind it was maybe thirty, wearing a University of the Philippines shirt, and he didn’t have a sign or a menu. I almost walked past. But there was something about the way he was arranging the chicharrón on a plate—carefully, almost obsessively—that made me stop. I asked for a bowl, and he nodded once and began.
His broth was darker than any I’d seen so far, almost mahogany, and it had a depth that suggested long simmering—maybe eight or ten hours, which is unusual for batchoy, which most stalls make in a single morning batch. He told me, in the halting English that characterizes Ilonggo hospitality, that he’d worked for three years at Deco’s before starting his own stall six months ago. “I make it different,” he said, which was the understatement of the trip. His batchoy had a sweetness to it, a caramelized note I couldn’t place, and when I asked him about it he just smiled and pointed to the onions he’d been caramelizing in a separate pan. “That’s my secret,” he said. I never got his name, and the stall had no name either. But I’ve been thinking about that bowl for weeks.
One afternoon, I made a mistake that cost me time and taught me something. I’d heard about a stall called Batchoyan sa Tabing Ilog, which a blog claimed was the original home of La Paz batchoy—not the dish’s invention, exactly, but the place where it had been standardized into the form people recognize today. I took a tricycle from the market, paid the driver 70 pesos, and arrived at a closed, shuttered building with a faded sign. A neighbor told me the owners had retired two years ago, and the stall had closed permanently. I stood there for a minute, annoyed at myself for not checking, then negotiated with the tricycle driver to take me back. That round trip cost me 140 pesos and forty-five minutes, and I didn’t learn anything useful except that travel advice online is rarely current. The blog post had been from 2019, and in the Philippines, two years is a long time for a small business to stay open.
Back at the market, I decided to stop worrying about lineage and just eat. This is when the trip shifted from a checklist to something more natural. I stopped asking stall owners about their recipes, stopped comparing bowls against each other, stopped taking notes between spoonfuls. I ate at a stall called Jen’s, where the broth was thinner but the chicharrón was exceptionally crunchy. I ate at a stall whose name I forgot instantly, where the egg was missing from my bowl and I didn’t care. I ate a bowl at 9 a.m. the next morning, when the market was still waking up and the batchoy vendors were just beginning to set up their pots, and the broth—still coming to a boil, not yet fully seasoned—was the thinnest and least satisfying of the trip. But it was also the most honest, because it showed me what the dish looks like before it’s been finished, before the last adjustments that turn a good bowl into a great one.
A detail that only makes sense if you’ve been there: the vendors use the same water to rinse the bowls between customers. A large plastic tub sits beside each stall, the water cloudy and warm, and bowls are dipped, swirled, and placed back on the counter without any soap. This isn’t a hygiene concern—the heat of the broth kills anything, and the practice is so universal that no one questions it—but it’s a texture you can feel. The bowl is slightly greasy from the previous customer’s broth, and that residual grease mixes with your own broth, creating a layering of flavors across service that would horrify a health inspector and delight a cook. By the fourth bowl of the day, I could taste the ghost of the order before mine.
The best bowl I had came at 6 p.m. on my final evening, at a stall near the market’s rear exit. It was called simply “La Paz Batchoy” with no owner’s name, and it was run by a family of three—a grandmother, her daughter, and a teenage grandson who handled the money. The grandmother was the one who made the broth, and she did so in a pot so large that she needed a step stool to stir it. I watched her for a while before ordering. She added things from unmarked jars, tasted the broth with a spoon, added more from another jar, tasted again. It was the only time I saw someone adjust a batch mid-service, and the resulting bowl was the most balanced of the trip: fatty without being heavy, salty without being sharp, the garlic and pepper and pork all present but none dominating. I told the grandmother, through her daughter, that it was the best I’d had. She nodded, unsmiling, and pointed at her pot. “Forty years,” she said.
I left Iloilo the next morning, and on the flight back to Manila, I realized that the thing everyone gets wrong about La Paz batchoy is that they treat it as a single dish. It’s a template, and the variations between stalls are not imperfections to be ranked but the whole point of the exercise. The “original” batchoy doesn’t exist in any single bowl; it exists in the decisions each cook makes, and the only way to find it is to eat enough bowls that you stop looking for one perfect version and start experiencing them all as part of a larger, messier thing.
📷 Photos: Rô Acunha (Pexels), Antonio Partida (Pexels)
