Why has Filipino food never gone mainstream?

[peedipeedi178]

The title of this thread made me think instantly of Anthony Bourdain (sp?). I think he asked that same question on an episode.

 

[klipschorn]

Filipino food has all types of awesomeness. Dinuguan is by far my favorite and yes, I know whats in it.

 

[coolcat4]

filipino food is so expensive compare to other foods. Typical filipinos jack up the prices on everything.

 

[icyyyesr two3]

cuz nobody wants to eat balut (i dont even know why i know what that is)

 

[bravo]

Originally Posted by aubstuh86

filipino food is the worst type of ethnic cuisine in the world next to ethiopian. chicken adobo is the only good dish.

 

[tupac jordan]

What's good Ethiopian food tho? I went to an Ethiopian restaurant once and I didn't go back. I had injera & some cube meat & too much honeywine. I felt like I drank Cisco wine.

 

[sleepybluedemon]

Good food sells...

 

[jfmartimcdandruff]

Originally Posted by aubstuh86

filipino food is the worst type of ethnic cuisine in the world next to ethiopian. chicken adobo is the only good dish.

What have you eaten so far? It's obvious that you haven't eaten much.

 

[zk1mpls]

Originally Posted by JayPesoz

Originally Posted by Copp 2 Of Em

Originally Posted by swyftdahoe

Originally Posted by Copp 2 Of Em

Most filipino dishes take a significant amount of time to prepare.
I know when my mom cooks, she won't be able to prepare meals for 20 - 30 minutes, unless it's something very basic.
It's not like Pho or Sushi, where they can be prepared in a short time span.
If there were a Filipino restaurant, the menu has to be 'watered-down'

What? That couldn't be further from the truth. Pho takes forever to make but yes, they make a huge batch and just leave the soup boiling for the whole day. Sushi ain't exactly fast to make either. They just prepare a lot ahead of time.

In any case, are there any really watered-down Filipino dishes? I mean, that's a good thing! You can't go mainstream if you're gonna go hardcore authentic. A person new to the cuisine just isn't going to eat that kinda stuff. Anyways, I'm Asian and white-washed as hell. I can only eat the noob dishes for all the Asian cuisines.. whether it be Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, etc..

but that's what I mean. When you order pho or sushi, the only thing that needs to be done is the specific meats and vegetables the customer ordered, then voila... you're done.
For Filipino food, each dish is completely different using different types of meat sometimes, sauces, soups and vegetables, so it's going to be hard have a filipino sit-in restauran that simply makes a huge batch and let it sit there.
The only Filipino spots in my city are those that already give you a selection as they are already made and is just being heated - kind of like the chinese joints in the mall food courts.

that's what I was telling my boys how it is in the PI. Once you eat a meal, they start preparing the next meal immediately, and only finish cooking when it's time to eat lunch, then all over until dinner

There's nothing fast

QFT

That's true even in our home!

 

[Junok]

Gerry's Grill at Union City -

Kalesa at Milpitas (by Q-Cup/Frozos) -

 

[tupac jordan]

Do you guys think the Filipino restaurants are "gringoing" it down or using less spices to cut down costs? I love Lechon kawali & crispy pata butit needs salt.

 

[eleet1]

Sisig

  

 

[sid nasty]

im filipino and ill admit it, besides a few dishes, filipino food aint all that great

 

[airphilippines]

Originally Posted by TheTruthHurts74

It's because Filipino food is more of the type of cuisine that you would eat at someone's home. It's homestyle type food.

It doesn't really translate well into a restaurant type setting, since it's not very appealing to folks who aren't in the know already. Other Asian foods (at least Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and now Viet), are way more appealing to regular consumers.

I'm not Filipino, but I've tried nearly all of it, having dated a Pinay, lived in Cerritos and used to be fast & furious. Filipino food is great(diniguan/sinigang/kare kare/sigsig/etc), but it's not the kind of stuff that I'm in the mood for when I choose to go out to eat. It's the kind of stuff that I associate with family parties, etc. That's why the majority of the Filipino restaurants you see tend to be cafeteria style, with all of the selections stewing in a buffet style line. It's not really your typical "made to order" kind of food that satisfies most Westernized palettes

 

[Los Angeles]

For all my folks in Socal, check out: Magic Wok, Artesia.

Great eats for CHEAP

 

[frink85]

http://www.latimes.com/fe...20100225,0,6202861.story

André Guerrero grew up eating Filipino food, but you'll find few traces of it on his menu at the Oinkster, and none at all at his new Marché L.A. Nor will you find Filipino food on the menus at Providence, Pizzeria Mozza or Church & State, all prominent local restaurants with Filipino chefs in the kitchens or front offices.

---

FOR THE RECORD:
Filipino food: In Thursday's Food section, a caption accompanying an article about Filipino home cooking referred to a dish as Mom's nigala. The beef stew dish is called Mom's nilaga. —

---

Some cuisines, such as the deeply flavorful mélange of foods from the Philippines, seem to resist assimilation into mainstream culture, thriving in home kitchens but stubbornly remaining there.

And for the many chefs of Filipino heritage who cook in some of the finest restaurants in Los Angeles, there is a very distinct line drawn between their private and professional kitchens — the food of their home culture may be cooked for staff meals, but it rarely crosses the pass into the dining room itself.

"I love it. I grew up eating it," says Guerrero, a Filipino American chef who has owned or partnered in a string of restaurants in Los Angeles over the last 25 years. "But how does it fit into what we do? It really doesn't."

Guerrero had put the traditional Filipino parfait halo-halo and an upscale version of his classic chicken adobo on the menu at his earlier restaurant Max, and milkshakes made from the purple yam ube are a favorite at the Oinkster. But for the most part, the cuisine of his home stays there.

Providence's chef-owner, Michael Cimarusti, and his wife and business partner, Crisi Echiverri, eat a lot of Filipino food at home — Echiverri is Filipino American — but you won't find any influences on the menu of the two-star Michelin restaurant.

Echiverri, who met her husband while both were at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and who has worked in the kitchens of Wolfgang Puck and Pierre Hermé, says she's played with Filipino flavors in the pastry kitchen. But she'll make her aunt's bichu-bichu, crispy coconut fritters in a brown sugar sauce, at home, not at the restaurant.

This separation between home cooking and restaurant cooking holds true whether home is your mother's kitchen in Eagle Rock, or in the Philippines itself, a vast archipelago (named for King Philip of Spain) of some 7,000 islands scattered across the warm waters between Taiwan and Malaysia.

"The food is so regional, we don't have one unifying dish," says Marvin Gapultos, a Filipino American who runs the Los Angeles food blog Burnt Lumpia. "There's adobo, but there's about 7,000 ways to make it."

The island-to-recipe ratio may not be literal, but the diversity of the people, the landscape and the history — occupied or colonized by the Chinese, the Spanish and the Americans, with Mexican influences from the Acapulco-Manila galleon trade — is reflected in the haphazard etiology of the food.

The cuisine can seem a jumble of indigenous fruits and fishes, with calamansi limes and bottles of vinegar that spike the stews and soups. Many native dishes trace to Indonesia and Malaysia (biko, suman), others are fused with the traditions of China (lumpia, pancit), Spain (escabeche) or Mexico (the trade routes brought tamarind, chiles and chocolate), coupled with the military legacy of America (hot dogs, spaghetti and Spam).

In the kitchens of Pizzeria Mozza, chef de cuisine Joe Marcus also shares this division of home and professional cooking. The graduate of Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Pasadena, who is Filipino American, cooked at Ciudad, Sona, Literati 2 and Campanile. "Have I cooked Filipino food professionally? No. Never," Marcus says.

That Filipino food has, by and large, not been assimilated into mainstream American cuisine is ironic, given how adept Filipinos historically have been at assimilating into other dominant cultures (the country is Catholic; English is the second official language), and given how assimilated the myriad cuisines have been within the country itself.

"It's probably one of the least understood cuisines," says Rodelio Aglibot, a Filipino chef who was the executive chef at Koi before opening the now-shuttered Yi Cuisine, perhaps the only upscale Filipino restaurant Los Angeles has had. "Are we Pacific Islanders? Are we Asians? There isn't, like, a defined identity," says Aglibot, who is now chef-partner of Sunda in Chicago.

Aglibot says that for a few years at Yi Cuisine, "I did crispy pata with foie gras," deep-fried pork leg with liver sauce. "I did pork belly adobo." But still he kept the food close to its origins. "I don't sous-vide my pork belly. It's got to be close to its roots, or else it's something else."

Whether Filipino food fit in one of Guerrero's mainstream restaurants came up again last year when he tapped Gary Menes, who is also Filipino American, to become executive chef and partner of his restaurant Marché L.A. Menes had cooked at Palate Food + Wine and Patina, and had staged for more than a year at the French Laundry.

"Gary tossed around the idea of doing molecular gastronomy Filipino food," Guerrero says, although he admits that neither chef ever seriously considered it.

Although Menes has never cooked Filipino food professionally, he would cook it in restaurant kitchens when he got homesick. At the French Laundry, he'd make his mother's nilaga, a traditional beef stew, for staff meals. That he had to bring the celery for the dish from home — Thomas Keller rarely uses it in his kitchens — seems symbolic.

At Church & State bistro, the Filipino influence may not be on the menu, but it's palpable once you talk to the staff. Executive chef Walter Manzke and his wife, Marge, frequently visit the islands where she grew up. Marge Manzke, who was the pastry chef at Bastide during her husband's tenure there as executive chef, cooked previously at Patina and Mélisse. "Every time I cooked staff meals, I'd try and do something. I'd make lumpia at Mélisse."

Like Menes, Manzke says she demarcates the food of home from the food on the menu at the restaurants where she's worked. "Being classically trained, I just kind of separate it."

Mary Jo Gore, a Filipino chef instructor at the Cordon Bleu school in Pasadena and a friend of the Manzkes from Patina, says part of the problem is aesthetic. Filipino food, she says, is comfort food. "Visually, it's not very appealing. It's stewed and brown and oily and fried."

Gore thinks part of the assimilation problem is that many Filipino restaurants in this country are either mom-and-pop places (called turo-turo or "point-point" restaurants, because you often just point at the buffet-style food) or fast food (think Jollibee). "I don't understand why it can't go beyond fast food. Filipino food is not fast food. It takes time to cook tripe and oxtail."

Church & State sous chef Allen Buhay, who is Filipino and who trained at Jean Georges in New York after culinary school, says that he purposely arranged a stage at Yi Cuisine when he was in school. "I was Googling [for Filipino restaurants]. I was like, ‘How is there nothing? How has no one done it yet?' "

Maybe it is simply a question of the time it takes to move a cuisine from family table to restaurant family meal to the mainstream for it to get beyond the belief system of home, where no one cooks the kare kare and sinigang and, yes, that 40-pound whole roasted suckling pig, as well as your mother or grandmother does. Also, if there are 7,000 recipes for adobo, then only one of them is the one you grew up with.

"Why hasn't Filipino food assimilated?" asks Aglibot rhetorically. "Because it's still assimilating."

 

[cincoseisdos]

Originally Posted by frink85

http://www.latimes.com/fe...20100225,0,6202861.story

André Guerrero grew up eating Filipino food, but you'll find few traces of it on his menu at the Oinkster, and none at all at his new Marché L.A. Nor will you find Filipino food on the menus at Providence, Pizzeria Mozza or Church & State, all prominent local restaurants with Filipino chefs in the kitchens or front offices.

---

FOR THE RECORD:
Filipino food: In Thursday's Food section, a caption accompanying an article about Filipino home cooking referred to a dish as Mom's nigala. The beef stew dish is called Mom's nilaga. —

---

Some cuisines, such as the deeply flavorful mélange of foods from the Philippines, seem to resist assimilation into mainstream culture, thriving in home kitchens but stubbornly remaining there.

And for the many chefs of Filipino heritage who cook in some of the finest restaurants in Los Angeles, there is a very distinct line drawn between their private and professional kitchens — the food of their home culture may be cooked for staff meals, but it rarely crosses the pass into the dining room itself.

"I love it. I grew up eating it," says Guerrero, a Filipino American chef who has owned or partnered in a string of restaurants in Los Angeles over the last 25 years. "But how does it fit into what we do? It really doesn't."

Guerrero had put the traditional Filipino parfait halo-halo and an upscale version of his classic chicken adobo on the menu at his earlier restaurant Max, and milkshakes made from the purple yam ube are a favorite at the Oinkster. But for the most part, the cuisine of his home stays there.

Providence's chef-owner, Michael Cimarusti, and his wife and business partner, Crisi Echiverri, eat a lot of Filipino food at home — Echiverri is Filipino American — but you won't find any influences on the menu of the two-star Michelin restaurant.

Echiverri, who met her husband while both were at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and who has worked in the kitchens of Wolfgang Puck and Pierre Hermé, says she's played with Filipino flavors in the pastry kitchen. But she'll make her aunt's bichu-bichu, crispy coconut fritters in a brown sugar sauce, at home, not at the restaurant.

This separation between home cooking and restaurant cooking holds true whether home is your mother's kitchen in Eagle Rock, or in the Philippines itself, a vast archipelago (named for King Philip of Spain) of some 7,000 islands scattered across the warm waters between Taiwan and Malaysia.

"The food is so regional, we don't have one unifying dish," says Marvin Gapultos, a Filipino American who runs the Los Angeles food blog Burnt Lumpia. "There's adobo, but there's about 7,000 ways to make it."

The island-to-recipe ratio may not be literal, but the diversity of the people, the landscape and the history — occupied or colonized by the Chinese, the Spanish and the Americans, with Mexican influences from the Acapulco-Manila galleon trade — is reflected in the haphazard etiology of the food.

The cuisine can seem a jumble of indigenous fruits and fishes, with calamansi limes and bottles of vinegar that spike the stews and soups. Many native dishes trace to Indonesia and Malaysia (biko, suman), others are fused with the traditions of China (lumpia, pancit), Spain (escabeche) or Mexico (the trade routes brought tamarind, chiles and chocolate), coupled with the military legacy of America (hot dogs, spaghetti and Spam).

In the kitchens of Pizzeria Mozza, chef de cuisine Joe Marcus also shares this division of home and professional cooking. The graduate of Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Pasadena, who is Filipino American, cooked at Ciudad, Sona, Literati 2 and Campanile. "Have I cooked Filipino food professionally? No. Never," Marcus says.

That Filipino food has, by and large, not been assimilated into mainstream American cuisine is ironic, given how adept Filipinos historically have been at assimilating into other dominant cultures (the country is Catholic; English is the second official language), and given how assimilated the myriad cuisines have been within the country itself.

"It's probably one of the least understood cuisines," says Rodelio Aglibot, a Filipino chef who was the executive chef at Koi before opening the now-shuttered Yi Cuisine, perhaps the only upscale Filipino restaurant Los Angeles has had. "Are we Pacific Islanders? Are we Asians? There isn't, like, a defined identity," says Aglibot, who is now chef-partner of Sunda in Chicago.

Aglibot says that for a few years at Yi Cuisine, "I did crispy pata with foie gras," deep-fried pork leg with liver sauce. "I did pork belly adobo." But still he kept the food close to its origins. "I don't sous-vide my pork belly. It's got to be close to its roots, or else it's something else."

Whether Filipino food fit in one of Guerrero's mainstream restaurants came up again last year when he tapped Gary Menes, who is also Filipino American, to become executive chef and partner of his restaurant Marché L.A. Menes had cooked at Palate Food + Wine and Patina, and had staged for more than a year at the French Laundry.

"Gary tossed around the idea of doing molecular gastronomy Filipino food," Guerrero says, although he admits that neither chef ever seriously considered it.

Although Menes has never cooked Filipino food professionally, he would cook it in restaurant kitchens when he got homesick. At the French Laundry, he'd make his mother's nilaga, a traditional beef stew, for staff meals. That he had to bring the celery for the dish from home — Thomas Keller rarely uses it in his kitchens — seems symbolic.

At Church & State bistro, the Filipino influence may not be on the menu, but it's palpable once you talk to the staff. Executive chef Walter Manzke and his wife, Marge, frequently visit the islands where she grew up. Marge Manzke, who was the pastry chef at Bastide during her husband's tenure there as executive chef, cooked previously at Patina and Mélisse. "Every time I cooked staff meals, I'd try and do something. I'd make lumpia at Mélisse."

Like Menes, Manzke says she demarcates the food of home from the food on the menu at the restaurants where she's worked. "Being classically trained, I just kind of separate it."

Mary Jo Gore, a Filipino chef instructor at the Cordon Bleu school in Pasadena and a friend of the Manzkes from Patina, says part of the problem is aesthetic. Filipino food, she says, is comfort food. "Visually, it's not very appealing. It's stewed and brown and oily and fried."

Gore thinks part of the assimilation problem is that many Filipino restaurants in this country are either mom-and-pop places (called turo-turo or "point-point" restaurants, because you often just point at the buffet-style food) or fast food (think Jollibee). "I don't understand why it can't go beyond fast food. Filipino food is not fast food. It takes time to cook tripe and oxtail."

Church & State sous chef Allen Buhay, who is Filipino and who trained at Jean Georges in New York after culinary school, says that he purposely arranged a stage at Yi Cuisine when he was in school. "I was Googling [for Filipino restaurants]. I was like, ‘How is there nothing? How has no one done it yet?' "

Maybe it is simply a question of the time it takes to move a cuisine from family table to restaurant family meal to the mainstream for it to get beyond the belief system of home, where no one cooks the kare kare and sinigang and, yes, that 40-pound whole roasted suckling pig, as well as your mother or grandmother does. Also, if there are 7,000 recipes for adobo, then only one of them is the one you grew up with.

"Why hasn't Filipino food assimilated?" asks Aglibot rhetorically. "Because it's still assimilating."

great read bro

 

[simplisd]

Originally Posted by airmaxpenny1

I don't think dog would go over well in America.

The amount of Filipino spots in SD is pretty ridiculous

 

[shogun]

I mostly eat the breakfast meals and desserts.  I like my dad's cooking the best and usually don't like anyone else's food.  I'm just not that into filipino cuisine and I haven't even tried to learn how to cook any of it.

 

[airalphabet]

Man looking at those pics make hungry as hell.

Good question OP, I've been wondering the same thing.

I live in NYC though and we have plenty of Filipino restaurants here. 69th st FTW.

 

[chickhien]

i asked my culinary chef friend (filipino) why ive never seen a filipino restaurant, he said for the following reasons:
1. filipinos have discriminating taste when it comes to their own food. meaning everyone's mom or dad makes a certain dish vastly different from other families.
2. filipinos will hate on a filipino restaurant because it doesnt taste the way they expected due to reason number 1
3. would you eat at a filipino restaurant if another filipino person told you the food sucked?

 

[airalphabet]

Good article there.
I'm pretty sure with the right approach they can make it work.

 

[westcoastsfinest]

Originally Posted by airmaxpenny1

I don't think dog would go over well in America.

Originally Posted by aaronpayumo

Ittakes too long to cook and it's a tedious job just to get a bitebecause you're spending most of your time dissecting a fish.

In addition, we're not business-minded enough.Filipinos are raised to be nurses or engineers, and if they can't, theyget a government or military profession.

The only Filipinos in the United States that Ican think of that are really making it are the founders of Crooks &Castles and some club promoters.

wow...the two most ignorant posts in NT ever

OP  where do you live? in kentucky or something?

jollibees and goldilocks and other filipino restaurants are everywhere here in cali

 

[eddiee21]

One simple answer is cause it's straight nasty. Filipino food is the worst food. Seriously, dinuguan

, balut

. And all the other dishes which all consist of boiled meat and some water and seasoning. Ain't no one trying to eat that crap. Even the staples of Filipino foods, lumpia and pancit don't cut it when compared to other ethnic cuisines.

Yes, I am Filipino.

 

[oh you mad]

Originally Posted by jeyel

dakid23 wrote:

---

What about Salvadoran food?

 



  


pupusas are disgusting