Kuya Ja’s Lechon Belly, Rockville, Montgomery County, Maryland

The New York Times posted a list of the 25 Best Restaurants in Washington Right Now. Earlier I posted on one of the 25, Crisfield. Now here’s another, Kuya Ja’s Lechon Belly.

Lechon Belly is a much-honored restaurant in a strip mall at 5268-H Nicholson Lane. It’s a tiny space with only a handful of tables. The place gets crowded so there’s a fair amount of noise in various languages — this is not the place for a business meeting — but the chatter is cheerful and rarely too loud. When we arrived all the tables were full, and there was a line, but a prominent sign on the wall buoyed my spirits.

These people know what they’re talking about.

We ordered and, fortunately, a table opened up for us during the short wait. Nancy chose a bowl, KJ’s Signature Pancit.

There are many regional variations pf pancit, a noodle dish, and Kuya Ja seems to have developed his own. Shrimp, chicken, longanisa (Filipino sausage similar to Linguiça and Argentine chorizo), egg, sundry vegetables and sprouts, and rice noodles.

Nancy picked up the bowl to shift it and exclaimed, “That’s heavy!” It was a lot of food, and I had to help. Nancy commented on how good it was, and when I asked what she liked in it, she responded that it was all good. The   shrimp were small, sweet, and tender.   The sausage was mild with good flavor, and the pork was very tender.     She liked both the flavor and the variety of vegetables. And she was, as usual, spot on.

I ordered the Lechon Belly Sandwich, a combination of pork belly, pork skin, spring onion, caramelized onion, arugula, and atsara. (I looked it up and atsara is a pickle made from grated unripe papaya and caramelized onions). I think it came with chips, but I’m not certain.

Here’s a side view in progress.

This was a great sandwich. The pork was rich and beautifully tender, and the skin, ah, the skin, was crisp and delicious, bursting with concentrated flavor. You know how the pork skins mixed into the meat at Bum’s, the Skylight Inn, and other whole hog places add texture and flavor? This is closer to the big sheet of skin you get at Sid’s Catering that creates a higher skin to meat ratio. Lechon Belly has that high ratio. The bread with its laudable crust and light interior was a good platform for the sandwich, and the accompaniments added a harmonized background chorus of flavors and textures.

Both of our dishes were delicious, and you really deserve a treat right now, don’t you? You owe it to yourself to go to Kuya Ja’s Lechon Belly.

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