New restaurant offers ethnic eats, ice cream
Esperanza Weaver, known as Espy to her friends and customers, has opened a momand- pop style restaurant at 1332 S. Main St. that serves hand-dipped ice cream and traditional Filipino food, including the halo-halo dessert, below, and the adobo marinated meats with rice egg rolls and crab rangoon. (EXAMINER PHOTO | REUBEN MEES)
A Filipino food and hand-dipped ice cream joint in Bellefontaine may seem like a quirky mix, but that’s just the way Esperanza Weaver likes it.
“I hope when I opened the place people would want Hershey’s ice cream, but they want to try the food,” the restaurant owner said of her menu selections. “The people they are like blackbirds. They come in all at once and we are very busy, and then poof … all gone.”
Esperanza, known as Espy to her friends and customers, is not new to the mom-and-pop shop concept, however, and Bellefontaine is actually a step up in size from her previous location in the 1,820-person Preble County village, Lewisburg.
“My customers there loved me. Since I closed the place, they are looking for me; they are sad I leave,” Weaver said of her decision to move, which was largely based on the suggestion of her son Mark Ygnacio, who is an associate at Honda and father to her only grandbaby to date.
Espy’s Ice Cream opened at 1332 S. Main St. in early August and promotion has been mainly by word-of-mouth, the mother and son said.
While ice cream is always on the menu, the selection of Filipino fare will rotate daily, they said.
On Monday, the Shanghai is a sausage wrapped like an egg roll; Tuesday is a stir fry of rice, veggies and meats; Wednesday’s menu features the popular adobo, or marinated meats; Thursday is pancit, or stir-fried noodles; and Friday’s meal is kare-kare, a hearty stew complemented with peanut sauce.
All the meals are served with egg rolls and crab rangoon, which despite the shared name are significantly different than their counterparts on menus of Chinese restaurants, Ygnacio said.
“We tried to keep the menu simple,” he said. “We wanted to do a different meal every day, but people really like the adobo. We are still trying to decide what we want to do with the menu.”
While traditional American-style ice cream sundaes and milkshakes are a staple of the ice cream operation, Espy’s also has a specialty dessert called the halo-halo, which is a frozen Filipino concoction that includes tapioca pearls, flan, fruits, jello, shaved ice and numerous other sweets before being topped with a scoop of ice cream.
Ygnacio said he thought the restaurant would give the family a way to share their culture with Bellefontaine.
“I’ve been living here 10 years and there are not a lot of restaurants like this,” he said. “Most of the people I know here have never tried Filipino food so I thought she could open up a Filipino carryout.”
And the concept is catching on.
I love the ice cream and the food is really good too,” Bellefontaine High School junior Michael Horvath said as he waited for Espy to mix him up a milkshake after school on Wednesday afternoon. “This was my first time trying Filipino food, but it has all been very good.”
They plan to keep the restaurant open from 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday, but hours may change somewhat as winter approaches, the owners said.
More information and daily specials are available by visiting the business’ Facebook page.