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In today’s review… we’ll cover a Filipino restaurant that probably should stick to being a dessert and ice cream store since the ube ice cream is fine, but the food, not so much.

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The Ratings

Our simple & honest checklist covers a restaurant’s key ingredients:
Ambiance, Service, and Food.

3/10

The Mt Pleasant Purple Patch restaurant caught our attention from the 4.7-star Google Reviews and the abundance of pictures online containing purple foods: ube, mostly in the form of ice cream. We were intrigued, especially since this little neighborhood has been getting some foodie attention (stay tuned for more Mt Pleasant St NW write-ups). As you’re making your way to the restaurant, you might accidentally walk right past it, as the entrance is relatively narrow and down some stairs. Don’t fret though because you’ll realize you’re in the right place when you see purple colored accents and signs. To enter the restaurant proper (versus the outdoor patio), make your way down a few steps on the side of the street. As you walk through the entrance door, you’ll be hit with odors… of food… but not the best smelling ones. You’ll next notice the bar, followed by a long corridor with the restaurant’s dining tables. The decor is all over the place and reminded us of a Turkish bazaar mixed with a thrift shop: tropical bamboo wallpaper on one wall, painted white bricks on another, Filipino and American flags, marble countertops, but then an “employee only” door left open with so much dust and black marks, you have to wonder if it’s ever been cleaned… Anyway, the layout is quite a disastrous sight to see. If the weather is nice enough, we recommend the restaurant’s outdoor seating. Overall, given the need for renovations and the unremarkable flea market vibes, we’d say the ambiance is below average.

4/10

Slightly below average service. Our waiter offered us some recommendations — but, when the food was a bit too spicy, we had to find our waiter to request more water for the table.

2/10

Not the finest of selections. Exploring new restaurants occasionally comes at the cost of a bad experience and we apologize to our friend who joined us on this particular adventure. We know the pain didn’t only last during mealtime…

Anyway, the Filipino restaurant has a long (scattered over multiple pages) and sort of complicated to digest menu (pun intended). After sorting through what we wanted to munch down on, we opted to try some of the chef’s specialties, to include the Sizzling Sisig and the Filipino Bistek. The Sizzling Sisig consists of cube-sized sautéed pork belly and shoulder pieces mixed with onions, peppers, and topped with a raw egg (indeed, a raw egg) — all of it resting on a sizzling platter (oooh… aaah). The Filipino Bistek is a marinated sirloin steak served with onions and potatoes in an almost stew-like fashion. The dish is accompanied by a handful of mixed greens and rice. Anyway, we ate our food. The Filipino Bistek was OK and eatable. The Sizzling Sisig on the other hand required a few cups of water and was deemed passably edible. Eatable for the first. Edible for the second. The difference in definitions became clearer later that day.

Alright, enough about the entrées. The desserts on the other hand are, in comparison, not bad, but still not anything we would recommend. For instance, the restaurant’s signature Ube Bread Pudding with Ube Ice Cream is alright. It’s hard to mess up ice cream, so that was fine. But the bread pudding… sort of like a pasty and slightly old protein bar. And, this brings us to the entire point of this review: we believe Purple Patch should be a dessert and ice cream store that refocuses itself on ube. After all, it’s theme is all about the ingredient and the only dishes worth visiting this place for are the ube desserts (and even then to be frank, we’d probably pass — sorry).

Reservation & Menu: