Chaaste Family Market

This Filipino spot is one of the best restaurants in Pasadena - and it doesn’t even look like a restaurant. You enter through a convenience store to get to the adjacent dining room, and order cafeteria-style at the counter, pointing out whatever looks good to you (or you can just have the person serving you recommend what’s good). The hand-rolled pork lumpia are excellent, and our favorites of the mains are the perfectly cooked eggplant with shrimp paste, and the juicy, vinegary adobo chicken. And at the end of your meal, nothing is going to prepare you for how fantastic the homemade turon is - they’re like sticky, crunchy, banana-stuffed lumpia. There’s a reason they sell them in boxes of five.