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parkerpyne t1_j1gv393 wrote

Reply to comment by Johnnadawearsglasses in Filipino food gains visibility in NYC, but restaurateurs point to a complicated reality by L0v3_1s_War

>The reality is that the nyc food scene is much less adventurous and interesting than one would imagine.

The reality is also that Philippine food isn't actually that interesting and crazy flavorwise as it's occasionally made out to be. I had a Filipina girlfriend for two years like 15 years ago. She lived in Jamaica, I lived and still live in Astoria and over those two years we visited countless times pretty much every Filipino restaurant in Woodside.

It's not a particularly challenging cuisine to even the most milkbread Westeners that you could think of. Their spices tend to be on the bland side and the best you can hope for is for rather satisfying dishes like crispy pata (I'm German so I am obviously well-versed in different preparations of pork hog so that was good) and pig blood stew which mostly presents the eater with a mental challenge to overcome their disgust while it actually tastes not controversial at all. The most curious dish I came across, interestingly, was tortang talong (a fire-roasted eggplant French toast of sorts). It tasted great (nothing out of anyone's comfort zone, mind you) but it struck me as remarkable because upon eating it for the first time I couldn't figure out its main ingredient. I then learned it's just eggplant that you roast on top of your gas stove in the fire until it's black, peel, pound flat, dip into eggs and put it in a pan with plenty of oil.

It's what I would describe as the essence of Filipino food: abundantly available cheap local ingredients prepared in a manner that is advantageous to a home cook who has to feed eight people on a budget. That's why it doesn't make for good restaurant food: It's too efficient and utilitarian and thus it won't appeal to foodies.

It is a however a goldmine for home cooks because their cuisine employs surprisingly simple hacks to make your life easy and convenient while cooking their and other food.

The food in the Philippines meanwhile is not much different. I visited my girlfriend's family with her in Cebu and spent three weeks there. Both the home-cooked as well as restaurant meals were all fine but clearly done with a sense of economy and efficiency. And that's what you would find in NYC because the people that make it out of the Philippines and move to the US started out firmly as daughters and sons of their middle class (there's literally a million Filipino nurses here in the US) and they love in a very aspirational way the American culture. They are the only people here in the US that I have met that are still into shopping malls for that reason. They subsequently americanized a lot of their food.

If you want an authentic representation of Filipino food, go to a Jollibee and gulp down their weird concoction of cut up hotdogs smothered in some sort of ketchup-based sauce over spaghetti. That is as authentically Filipino as it gets in the modern days.

This isn't to say that they don't have cool and genuinely weird food items. Someone here mentioned balut and those are the vestiges of a former distinctive national cuisine. There is very little left of it nowadays. I am not even sure you can get balut at a restaurant. For that you probably need to go to the Phil-Am grocery/bodega in Woodside.

For the record, I am not dissing their food. It is an absolutely unique food culture but it will never lend itself well to be served in a restaurant.

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spydormunkay t1_j1gzerq wrote

Filipino here. You hit the nail on the head with regards to Filipino food designed to be cooked at home for families. I agree. It is not restaurant food.

In the article it mentions other successful Asian cuisines that have had more success in America such as Chinese and Thai (I’m including Korean and Japanese as well). What those cuisines had in common is that they were built upon a well-developed street food/restaurant culture as most of the famous Asian dishes that have become very popular in America were already popular restaurant/street food back in their home countries. The dishes were practically designed solely for that kind of environment as most of them are rarely cooked at home.

Whereas all Filipino food is home food by design. It was never meant to be served in a restaurant. And the only really long standing Filipino places are ones that cater to Filipino families, basically.

Now that I think about it you can probably find parallels with all different kinds of ethnic foreign food. The only ones that ever make waves were ones that were already restaurant-designed from the ground-up. “Family-styled foreign food” rarely makes it out of their local neighborhoods.

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manila_traveler t1_j1hk4rk wrote

"All Filipino food is home food" is an overbroad statement -- if you talk about Filipino street food, even excluding pork bbq on a stick, there's turon (fried banana sliced lengthwise, seasoned with brown sugar), fish balls (small patties of fish meat and dough fried), isaw (fried pig/chicken intestines), taho (silken tofu dessert adopted from Hokkien immigrants) etc. Not to mention seasonal desserts like puto bumbong (rice cake) and bibingka (coconut & rice cake) and outlier dishes like pancit habhab (a noodle dish).

I think the issue is that by the time Filipino society had urbanized enough to develop new main dishes, the fast-food restaurant concept had already arrived. So the Philippines ended up "innovating" dishes like Filipino-style spaghetti.

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spydormunkay t1_j1ho0ce wrote

I’m talking about food that can conceivably drive a sit-down restaurant menu. I mention street food because a lot of Asian restaurant food items tend to derive from street food, doesn’t mean all street food is meant to be in a restaurant.

Perhaps you can make an make mainstay menu items of Pork BBQ, Pancit, or maybe isaw. Those can probably be made into fast food items. Besides that, there’s not much else you can do.

It’s either expensive Fusion that might die in a year, Jolibee, or family-style in Filipino neighborhoods.

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skydream416 t1_j1iu286 wrote

> For the record, I am not dissing their food. It is an absolutely unique food culture but it will never lend itself well to be served in a restaurant.

I think "never" is an ignorant thing to say here.

There's a new generation of filipino chefs who are working to change the food itself, as well as its perception in the states. Lasita in LA, bad saint in DC come to mind. The fact that we're talking about filipino food at all, when it wasn't on any gourmand's radar in the aughts, shows that it has changed and (probably) will continue to change.

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lickedTators t1_j1k1y9s wrote

> thus it won't appeal to foodies.

That's actually an argument in favor of Filipino restaurants sticking around.

Maybe they can find a better niche as with a hole-in-the-wall Chinese takeout vibe than trying to be a sit-down restaurant.

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