Comfy shoes, check. Umbrella, check. Camera, check. Empty belly, check. Belt I can loosen a few more notches, check.

When you enter Binondo for Ivan Man Dy's Big Binondo Food Wok walking tour, it's best to come prepared.

Ivan Man Dy conceived the Food Wok as a culinary tour of Chinese Manila. The Wok route circles Binondo in an arc that begins at the Basilica de San Lorenzo Ruiz (the Binondo Cathedral), and intersects a number of food stops along Quintin Paredes Street, Nueva Street (now known as Yuchengco Street), Benavidez Street, Salazar Street, Carvajal Street, and back at Quintin Paredes.

Ideally, you should finish the tour (as I did) burdened with a full stomach, a greater appreciation of the history of Binondo, and several thousand pesos' worth of swag to take home.

Plainspoken Food
Ivan is a gracious, gregarious Chinoy who fills in the history of the Chinese quarter with every step; a big task, considering the many changes that Binondo's undergone over the years.

What remains of old Binondo is a patchwork at best, with modernity filling in the spaces where the old world has been permitted to fade away. Luckily, Binondo's culture remains undiminished, the end result of the simple, hearty approach to life brought by merchants and coolies from Fujian province hundreds of years ago.

So there's an unbroken line from the no-nonsense Fujian province in China to the no-nonsense food served at the gleaming, air-conditioned, electric-purple Café Mezzanine on Quintin Paredes, just above the Eng Bee Tin store, our first stop on the walking tour.

The smiling waitresses ladle out clear broth into bowls, each with a single fish ball mingling with bits of spring onion. Next they serve us bowls of kiampong, literally "salted rice" in Hokkien - rice glazed with soy sauce, and mixed with chopped spring onion, caramelized onions, dried shrimp, adobo peanuts, and pork. We are told to pour a little broth into the kiampong to moisten it before eating.

I imagine the coolies who helped build Binondo Cathedral ate something like this - a frank and unaffected dish with notes of the sea and the soil. Even today it's hard to dress up kiampong as restaurant food; it's too simple and straightforward.

Divine Dumplings
From Quintin Paredes, Ivan leads us down through narrow Yuchengco Street (formerly Nueva Street); about ten minutes later, we find ourselves at Dong Bei Dumpling, a thriving dumpling place run by a first-generation immigrant couple.

The flow of immigrants from China has never actually stopped, Ivan tells us, and here's the evidence: dumplings prepared in the North Chinese style, prepared daily by hand, and boiled (not steamed) till ready. The Japanese stole the idea long ago and called it gyoza; we're eating the original stuff, made as the Northern Chinese intended it.

Ivan presents us with two types of boiled dumpling - one filled with chives and shrimp, the other filled with cabbage and pork. To conclude the experience, we had a fried pancake filled with ground pork. All dipped in our choice of sweetish soy sauce or chili sauce; you forget you're sitting in a kiosk no larger than closet, cheek-by-jowl with the kitchen staff working the dumplings into shape and boiling the lot.

Dong Bei is a matchbox of a restaurant, but if justice reigned, we'll be seeing the place take over the whole building in a couple of years' time.

Street Treats
We spend the next two hours sampling Binondo's sidewalk food. Ivan leads us through Ongpin Street to Salazar Street to Benavides Street, presenting us with tea eggs, bicho-bicho, and chien pao.

Tea eggs - hard-boiled chicken eggs soaked in a murky brown herbal infusion redolent of star anise. The longer the eggs sit, the stronger the flavor, but the eggs we eat have only been sitting in the "tea" for less than a day. The infusion marbles the firm egg white, and the herbal notes give the eggy treat a nice kick.

Bicho-bicho - hand-twisted, fried, and dusted with sugar on the spot. The trip so far has been an adventure in freshness, and if you've only had cold bicho-bicho before, the freshly-fried variety is a revelation. No day-old bicho-bicho will ever capture the mouth-feel of chewing into piping-hot dough shot through with sugar.

Chien pao - pan-toasted "siopao", filled with pork and spring onions. The toasted rice dough adds an interesting texture dimension to the familiar "siopao" experience, plus the vegetable content (spring onion?) is higher than I anticipated.

Lumpia Love
We make a brief stop at a Ho-Land Hopia outlet to fill up on swag, and Ivan foists some preserved Chinese hawthorn berries on us. I expect it to be sweeter, but it's more waxy than candy-like to my palate.

We walk through Carvajal Street, a dark alley that exits at Quintin Paredes, close to where the walking trip began. Ivan leads us into a shaded patio at the heart of the Uy Su Bin Building, one of the few art-deco structures left over from before the war.

The Po-Heng Lumpia House serves customers from the patio that sits in the space between buildings. The outfit is a one-product shop: the original fresh Hokkien-style lumpia that you can still find in hawker centers throughout Asia.

Ground peanuts, sugar, pepper, lard, carrots, and bean sprouts, blended and packaged in lumpia wrapper, served with a sweet and spicy sauce: we enjoy it knowing that the preparation and flavor is little changed from generations past, handed down without fail from honored Hokkien ancestors.

Familiar Flavors
If you're Filipino, the flavors you'll experience on the walking tour are superficially familiar - they're old Filipino standbys now, the siopao, the bicho-bicho, the lumpia - but the real surprise comes with the food's freshness and the experience of eating them in their original context.

Add to this the fact that Binondo's the best place in all of Manila to walk up a good appetite. The four hours flew by like nobody's business; any tightness in the tummy was soon worked over by a few minutes' pavement-pounding.

If you have an afternoon to spare, an appetite for Chinoy history, and a willingness to walk some way between meals, email Ivan Man Dy at fun@oldmanilawalks.com, or visit his website at www.oldmanilawalks.com.