This Late-Night Filipino Diner in Downtown Oakland Is Hidden in Plain Sight
The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.
Tita Becca’s is the kind of restaurant that almost doesn’t seem real.
What do you mean there’s an old-fashioned Filipino diner right smack in the middle of downtown Oakland where you can sit on a ’50s-style bar stool eating some of the most delicious pork sisig and kare-kare you’ve ever tasted — as late as 2 o’clock in the morning, no less?
Even as we savored each bite, it felt like some kind of fever dream. At the time of our visit, a couple weeks ago, the restaurant had no Yelp reviews and barely any social media presence. The lone “Tita Becca’s” sign painted on the wall outside gave no indication of what kind of food we might find inside (though a Pinoy would have recognized the bright yellow sun in the logo). The only reason we’d heard of the place at all was because of a kind reader who emailed us a glowing report.
When we pulled up to the restaurant at a little before 10 p.m. on a recent Friday, an older Filipino dude in a Warriors jersey and flip-flops was posted up outside, nursing the last few sips of a bottle of beer. Inside, the dining room was set up like the kind of old-timey diner you might see painted on a picture postcard: the long counter, the vintage stools, the nostalgic red and turquoise color scheme. The restaurant was almost entirely empty — just one young Filipino guy sitting at the counter, ladling pork sinigang over a bowl of white rice. The R&B playlist blaring from the speakers consisted almost entirely of sultry Mariah Carey jams.
Already, the place passed the vibe check. A perfect hundred out of a hundred points.
What you might expect to find at a restaurant that looks like this are three-egg omelettes and big stacks of pancakes with a pile of hash browns on the side. (We found out later that until late last year, the space had been home to a more classic American greasy spoon called Leo’s Diner.) Instead, Tita Becca’s serves a full — and surprisingly extensive — menu of homestyle Filipino dishes.
Chatting with the staff a bit, we learned that the restaurant is a family enterprise through and through. Mark, a gregarious middle-aged Filipino American with a wispy beard, is the main owner and public face of the business. His adult son was working up front, behind the counter, taking orders. And though she only popped her head out of the kitchen once or twice, we could see that Mark’s mother, the Tita Becca herself, was the real heart and soul of the restaurant — the one whose recipes made us start to feel homesick and nostalgic for her food even before we’d finished eating.
To put it plainly: Everything was mind-blowingly delicious. We started with an order of shrimp lumpia — whole large shrimp, their tails still attached, encased by the wrapper and deep fried until they were super-crunchy and almost too hot to eat. These were deeply satisfying, with or without the obligatory sweet chili dipping sauce.
Meanwhile, the Pampanga-style pork sisig was a revelation of textures and flavors. There was the crispiness of fried pork skin, along with the soft fat and the meaty, gelatinous bits. There was the heat of the chiles, the crisp tanginess of red onions and also an earthy undercurrent from the bits of chicken liver that they’d mixed into the sauce. Most of all, there was this wonderful brightness, from calamansi and lemon juice, that cut into the richness of the dish. Ladling the sisig over rice, we were able to keep eating it and eating it without ever getting tired of the taste.
Later, the owner confided that this wasn’t even the full version of the dish. They’d run out of the pig’s head meats — the ears, cheeks and so fork — that usually go into it, so they made a cobbled-together version using chopped up lechon.
If we’d known that ahead of time, we probably wouldn’t have also ordered the lechon kawali, the beloved Filipino dish of fried skin-on pork belly. We didn’t exactly have anything to complain about, though — it was one of the moistest and most jigglingly tender versions we’ve had in the Bay, with some of the crunchiest skin. The fatty pork was especially nice with either of the vinegar dips the shop offers, one spiked with chiles and the other with both chiles and chopped tomatoes.
And perhaps everyone knows by now that I can’t ever not order oxtail kare-kare if I see it on a menu. The peanut sauce in Tita Becca’s version was rich and velvety; the eggplant, bok choy and string beans were all cooked to exactly the right texture. And while the oxtails were small, there were a lot of them — the meat was so tender, and it was so very satisfying to suck on the bones.
Most impressive of all? Tita Becca’s makes its own bagoong (fermented shrimp paste), the salty-funky condiment traditionally served with kare-kare, in house, so that it was less aggressively salty than the jarred kind, with the same pungent umami punch. We kept stirring it in, and the dish kept tasting better and better. We could’ve eaten infinite amounts of rice.
In the end, our only regret was that we only had the stomach space to try four dishes — that we’d missed out on the other homey stews like the sinigang and the Bicol Express. How could any of it not have been delicious? Someone’s mom was cooking for us back there, probably the best home cook we knew in our circle of friends. That was the feeling we got, anyway.
By the time we finished our meal, only a few more customers had straggled in through the door. A millennial Filipina who sat at the restaurant’s one larger table and ordered a family-style meal for her group of non-Filipino friends. A couple of takeout customers bringing food over to the queer bar next door. It really felt like we had stumbled on a secret hiding in plain sight. And after we walked out at the end of the night, I started to worry, sincerely, that maybe we’d dreamed the whole thing.
Tita Becca’s is open Tuesday to Thursday 5–9 p.m., Friday 5 p.m.–2 a.m., Saturday noon–2 a.m. and Sunday noon to 6 p.m. at 400 15th St. in Oakland.
