Restaurants Near Our Baguio Transient: Where I Actually Eat

Nobody asks me where they should eat. They ask me where Good Taste is.

That is the question, every time, and it arrives already decided. Good Taste is the most popular place to eat in Baguio, and people come up here with it on the list the same way they come up with Burnham and Mines View on the list. My opinion is not being requested. Directions are.

For a long time I just gave the directions and left it at that, because it is not my job to argue with somebody's holiday.

But there is a gap between the restaurant everybody asks about and the restaurants I walk to myself, and it is wider than people expect. The one that gets asked about is the farthest away. The ones nobody asks about are the ones I can reach before my coffee goes cold.

I am not going to pretend that makes Good Taste wrong. It makes it famous, which is a different thing, and I will get to the difference in section four.

If I only get one recommendation, this is it.

O' Mai Khan is a Mongolian barbecue buffet on Upper Session Road and it has been there since 1987, which in Baguio restaurant terms is close to forever. The format is the reason we keep going back. You walk the counter, put what you want in a bowl — meat, noodles, vegetables, sauces, as much or as little as you like — and hand it over to be cooked on the griddle in front of you.

That solves the problem a family actually has. Everybody wants something different, and a set menu turns that into a negotiation. A buffet where each person assembles their own bowl means nobody compromises, and it means eating vegetarian is not an afterthought — you simply do not put meat in the bowl. No special request, no waiter to interrogate. That is the whole appeal for us.

As of August 2026 I would put it at ₱300 and up per head. I want to be straight that this is my own figure from eating there rather than something I copied off a menu board, so treat it as a ballpark and check on the day. For what it is worth, published reviews of O' Mai Khan had the buffet at ₱210 to ₱255 through the 2010s, so ₱300 in 2026 tracks with everything else in this city.

Three hundred pesos a head, walked to rather than driven to, everybody eating exactly what they wanted. That is why it is my favourite and not just my recommendation.

Now the one you actually came here for.

Good Taste is near Burnham Park — behind it, really. From our gate that is a ten-minute walk to Burnham, then another five on the far side, so call it fifteen minutes. That makes it the farthest thing on this page by a clear margin, and it is the only one anybody asks about. It gets me every time.

You can walk the whole way and plenty of guests do. You can also take a jeep and walk the last stretch, which is what I usually suggest, especially at night or when it is raining. Ten minutes in Baguio is not ten minutes on flat ground, and our honest Burnham Park walking times go through what that actually feels like.

As for whether it is worth it — yes, on its own terms. It is cheap and there is a lot of it. Para sa masa, and I mean that as a compliment. If you are feeding six people who have been walking around Baguio all day and you want everybody full without anybody doing arithmetic, Good Taste is very hard to beat. That is a real thing to be good at, and most restaurants cannot do it.

It is not, however, the best food within walking distance of this house. It is the most famous food within walking distance of this house. Those are two different sentences, and most guides only ever write the second one.

Here is the thing I have never seen in a Baguio food guide, and it is the most-used piece of information in this house.

A lot of our guests do not eat at Good Taste. They buy from Good Taste and bring it back.

They pick the food up, walk or ride back to 92 Valenzuela, heat it in our microwave, and eat it here. That is allowed and it happens constantly. It quietly solves both problems people run into over there — the walk home on a full stomach, and portion sizes that were never designed for two people at one table.

To be clear about the rule, because guests do ask: there is no cooking in the rooms. No burners, no rice cookers, no pans. Reheating food you bought outside is a completely different matter, and the microwave is there for exactly that.

So the honest shape of a lot of trips is this. Eat out once, at whichever of these places you fancy. Take the rest away. Heat it here the next day. Nobody plans it that way and almost everybody ends up doing it.

The Baguio night market works on the same principle if you are here in the evening — buy it there, carry it back, reheat it in the morning.

I will finish with the least glamorous recommendation on the page, because leaving it out would make the rest of this dishonest.

There are a lot of 7-Elevens around us. If your budget is genuinely tight — a student, a solo traveller stretching the trip one more night, anybody who has already spent the food money on pasalubong — that is the cheapest way to eat near this house, and it is open at any hour. I am not going to pretend otherwise just because a convenience store makes a worse story than a Mongolian buffet.

A ₱799 room and a 7-Eleven dinner is a real way to do Baguio, and I have watched plenty of people do it well and go home happy.

But if you are asking me where to go, and you have the three hundred pesos in the budget, it is O' Mai Khan. Every time. It is the one I would send my own family to, because it is the one I take my own family to.

To book with us, message facebook.com/vosbaguio or call 0936 895 6542. Before you send money to anyone in this city, check they are a real, established business first — you can browse verified stays through BaguioTransient.net. If we are full for your dates, BookBaguio is a reasonable way to compare other options, and VOS Villa handles larger groups in a single space.