Bred In The Bone
For the Filipino diaspora, food is connection. It’s heritage and culture. It’s longing and belonging. It’s a taste, literally, of home.
“Kumain ka na?”
These three Tagalog words tell you everything you need to know about the relationship that Filipinos have with their food. Sure, the phrase is directly translated as, “Have you eaten yet?”—but it’s also commonly used as a greeting. In the eyes of any Filipino, all is not right in the world if you aren’t well fed.
Food is at the heart of Philippine culture; it’s the centerpiece of every celebration, family gathering, and intimate tête-à-tête. It starts each day in the Philippines: an early-morning wakeup call as taho vendors announce their wares, ready to dish out warm cups of fresh silken tofu with arnibal (brown sugar syrup) and sago (tapioca pearls) from the aluminum buckets slung across their shoulders. And it’s the call of “Balut!” that punctuates every late night, with sellers walking the darkened streets between pools of light. When Filipinos emigrate from the motherland, food is the golden thread that ties us to a sense of home; the culinary touchstone that keeps us grounded in our culture.
Yana Gilbuena is a highly respected Filipino American chef who has traveled around the world to nurture understanding and dialogue about the vibrant food culture of the Philippines. Her unique Salo Series of pop-up kamayan dinners focused on gathering people for communal family-style meals, which were served on banana leaves and eaten without utensils; she spent years touring through all 50 of the United States, as well as Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Europe, Australia, and the Philippines. “It was hard trailblazing at first. Retraining people to eat with their hands was an uphill battle,” she admits. “Kamayan is a traditional part of our heritage that existed long before colonization, and I wanted my fellow Filipinos to take pride in acknowledging and honoring the roots of our identity.”
Growing up in Iloilo City, Gilbuena’s childhood was filled with regional Western Visayan dishes. “I ate inasal and laswa as a kid,” she recalls, reflecting that the comfort dishes her grandmother cooked for her were vastly different from the food she discovered upon moving north to Manila for university. “My primary goal with Salo Series was to showcase food from three different regions of the Philippines: Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao,” Gilbuena continues. “I really wanted to educate people that there’s more to Filipino cuisine than adobo, pancit, and lumpia . But it has nothing to do with ‘elevating’ Filipino cuisine—that term doesn’t sit well with me. Does it mean that our food isn’t good enough as it is, that it isn’t elevated just as it is? Our cuisine should stand in and of itself as worthy. Food is one of the only ways that we stay connected to our roots, our identity, our heritage, and our culture. If we’re misrepresenting that, then we’re doing ourselves a disservice.”
With an estimated 7,641 islands and over 150 languages spoken in the Philippines, capturing a taste of home is no small feat. Add all the influences from the country’s history of colonialism and trade—Spanish, Chinese, Malaysian, Japanese, Indian, Mexican, and American—and you end up with a panoply of flavors and cooking techniques that combine to create the remarkably diverse melange that is Philippine cuisine.
Alden Ong interprets Filipino food through his own unique story. The executive chef of Vancouver’s Farmer’s Apprentice restaurant was born in Quezon City, part of Metro Manila on the northern island of Luzon, but his Chinese-Filipino family mostly spoke Hokkien at home rather than Tagalog. “Being ‘Chinoy’ meant that I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about Filipino food,” he shares. “Sure, my dad would often pick up barbecued pork skewers for us from the market, and we’d have sweet saba cooked in syrup for snacks. But the dishes we’d eat at our dinner table were predominantly Taiwanese and Chinese.” Ong used to see Philippine cooking as a single slate of dishes. “However, think about the history and evolution of different ethnic cuisines in North America,” he points out. “Savvy diners now understand that Chinese food is super regional and respected, and Filipino food has to go through that same process too, leading people from generalization to wanting to learn more about its regional diversity.”
Delving deeper into the culinary traditions of his native country made Ong realize that something was missing—something he wanted to explore. “For me, cooking Filipino food is an exploration of my memories,” he explains, “while respecting the integrity of where a dish comes from, and sharing it with people as I continue to learn.”
He incorporates some hints of Filipino flavors into his dishes at Farmer’s Apprentice, but it was a 2019 pop-up dinner that really allowed him to dive into his culinary heritage. The dinner spotlighted Ong’s creative and modern expressions of classic Philippine fare, including fermented rice puto with dinuguan sauce and trout kinilaw with kalamansi tiger’s milk. The research and development process for his Filipino menu “was a real learning curve. It wasn’t about elevating the dishes—elevating a cuisine is such a wrong term,” he says. “Instead, it’s about presenting the essence and the spirit of a dish as it should be, but also adapting to the ingredients of place and applying the cooking techniques you’ve learned along the way. It’s about the evolution and innovation of a cuisine versus elevation.”
Malaysian-Chinese chef and restaurateur Justin Cheung articulates the Filipino culinary narrative from an equally distinct perspective. His wife Rachel Rodriguez is Canadian-born Filipino—her mom is from Laguna province, her dad is from Manila—and he wanted to incorporate the cuisine of her heritage when he opened his casual Vancouver restaurant Potluck Hawker Eatery in June 2020. “I went to Catholic private school and had so many Filipino classmates while I was growing up,” he says. “At my friends’ birthday parties, I ate a lot of Filipino food before I even realized what it was—spaghetti with hot dogs in it just made sense.”
Since becoming part of his wife’s family, Cheung has received a solid grounding in Filipino dishes and the tastes that they hold dear. “Philippine barbecue is one of my father-in-law’s pride and joys, and I often have long talks with my mother-in-law about different Filipino ingredients—from banana ketchup to bagoong (fermented fish or shrimp paste). They’ve helped me to understand the bold flavors of Filipino food,” Cheung reflects. “There’s a definite pucker factor from the sourness of elements like tamarind in dishes like sinigang. Spicy depth from raw garlic. Big on salt, but also very sweet. And you balance the taste of a dish to your liking, maybe adding a hint of funk with a bit of fish sauce, bumping up the sourness with suka (vinegar), and finishing up with a squeeze of kalamansi juice to add acidic brightness. Your palate gets sporadic hits from each of those individual layers of flavor, and it makes eating Filipino food really joyful.”
Potluck’s rotating Southeast Asian menu includes hearty Philippine dishes such as chicken soup and crispy pata. But it also features playful street-food specials like the Fili cheesesteak, with kalamansiand-soy bistek Tagalog smothered in Filipino cheese sauce; and palabok fries, borrowing its rich pork-and-shrimp sauce and chicharron and tinapa (smoked fish) toppings from a traditional noodle dish. The creative impetus behind many of Potluck’s Philippine menu items is Cheung’s chef de cuisine Raymond Reyes. A second-generation Filipino-Canadian born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Reyes is forging a deeper understanding of his ethnicity through his culinary explorations. “Until now, I was hyper-focused on French and Italian cuisine, working at some of the most celebrated restaurants in the city,” Reyes says. “But I realized that I’d been limiting myself. That’s not the only type of food that has a place. I’ve only been in the industry for five years, but I’ve been cooking Filipino food for my whole life. Food is very emotional, and Filipino food is all about how you feel. I’m coming to terms with and embracing who I really am—I feel that now that I’m really cooking.”
Philippine cuisine is truly a tapestry woven from the collective threads of our identities as Filipinos. In exploring ourselves as Filipinos within the diaspora, we must continue to discover the delights of all the different regions that comprise our cuisine, while acknowledging that Filipino-American or Filipino-Canadian food cooked by immigrants also has its own distinct identity. “There is no such thing as an end-all, be-all Filipino cuisine,” asserts Gilbuena. “If we just see the beauty that lies within diversity, that is what makes our cuisine so complex, so intricate, and so personal.”
Ong shares the sentiment. “Our North Star, if you will, is that taste of home and that sense of community, of giving and receiving when you invite someone to your house for a meal,” he shares. “It’s about the feeling you get every single time you eat it, regardless of where you are in the world.
Copyright © 2021 by Joie Alvaro Kent, Natural Habitat