Filipino food: the Rodney Dangerfield of ethnic cuisines

THE LATE Rodney Dangerfield was an old-school comedian that most Milllenials probably never heard of. He was nervous, overweight and always disheveled.  I'll always remember his trademark line: "I never get any respect."

You can apply that line to Filipino food. It just doesn't get any respect.

Filipinos are the second largest Asian American ethnic group in the United States next to the Chinese community. Yet, Filipino cuisine has lagged behind other the cuisines of other Asian countries.

Even though Filipinos have been in the America's since the Spanish galleon trade in the 18th century, the foods of Vietnam, India, Thailand, Korean and Malaysian flavors have  gained more notice and acceptance by non-Asians, complementing the more familiar Chinese and Japanese foods that Americans have grown up with.

Ironically, its another mode of transportation that is bringing Filipno food to the masses. The food truck scene has been spiced up with a heavy influx of Filipino entrepreneurs. Almost every major city that has a large concentration of Filipinos -- New York, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago anywhere in Hawaii and even in places where you wouldn't think of such as Utah and Arizona -- Filipino entrepreneurs and chefs have been garnering high marks for their culinary offerings.

Filipino-American restaurants have depended mainly on their Filipino customers to survive. 

Reaching a wider audience has been difficult and making the crossover has not been easy for a number of reasons.

Filipino food has recently been attracting the attention of the more adventurous foodies with good results.

Savor Filipino is an aggressive food movement to win over non-Filipinos to Filipino cuisine with a widely attended food extravaganza in San Francisco last August. It brought together some of the top chefs of Filipino cuisine from across the country, coast-to-coast, from New York City to San Francisco.

RELATED:Anthony Bourdain - 'Filipinos love feeding people.'

Ron Quesada, an advocate for anything Filipino, wrote an article in Positively Filipino about  the food festival, capturing the atmosphere of the event featuring the cooking of Filipino American singer Apl.de.Ap of the Black Eyed Peas.

Washington Post food writer wrote a glowing review of Manila Mart, a nondescript turo turo. Although the ambiance was lacking in the small mom-and-pop establishment, he apparently loved diving into the unfamiliar fare.

The restaurants Jeepney and Maharlika in the lower east side of NYC have been gaining devotees with their take on some dishes into more familiar-looking dishes. The longanisa hamburger (ground longanisa sausage) is shaped like a hamburger patty but the taste is nothing like the American standard burger. The sweet and slightly spicy sausage transformed into an American classic.

But that's the Filipino way: take a dish from another culture - whether it be Chinese, 
Spanish or American - and give it a twist to create a uniquely Filipino dish.

At Jeepney, you can eat with your hands off of banana leaves.

Nicole Ponseca, part owner of both Jeepney and Maharlika, has been waging a campaign 
introducing Filipino fare to the Big Apple's discriminating palates. She suggests that the reason
more Filipinos don't get into the restaurant trade is because of a sense of shame (hiya) of
the Philippines' cuisine. 

Nicole Ponseca, Maharlika owner, and chef Miguel Trinidad.

"That’s why [some restaurants] give the "white-man menu" [to customers] because they think 
they’re not going to like dinuguan, which is a pork blood stew. But why have hiya when the 
French have boudin noir and the Spanish have morcilla? It is because when you’re colonized 
over so many years, you don’t value your own culture, even though we have so much pride."

There's no sense of shame over at Pig and Khao, where the down-home creations of Leah 
Cohen, a competitor in Top Chef, is attracting devotees with her no-apologies-needed 
renditions of Filipino food - lots of variations of pork.

Even though the greatest concentration of Filipino restaurants can be found in Southern 
California and the San Francisco Bay Area (Hawaii is well aware of Filipino cuisine, its 
imbedded in their culture.) most of the good press is happening in the East Coast. 

While adobo, lumpia and pancit are the best known Filipino fare, there are other dishes 
that could easily make it on a 5-star menu. Sinigang, the tamarind-based soup would shine 
in anybody's menu; to my tastebuds, the Philippines' leche flan puts the Latino and Spanish 
versions to shame; and no one's roasted pig is better than the Filipinos' lechon, according to 
TV host and food raconteur Anthony Bourdain. Certainly nothing to be ashamed of, right?

No less than Andrew Zimmerman, TV food host of "Bizarre Foods" proclaimed the food of the Philippines would be the next cuisine to entice American palates. “I want to go on record —this is not something that’s hot now somewhere and will get hot everywhere else,” Zimmerman said. 

“It’s just starting. I think it’s going to take another year and a half to get up to critical mass, but everybody loves Chinese food, Thai food, Japanese food, and it’s all been exploited. The Filipinos combined the best of all of that with Spanish technique. The Spanish were a colonial power there for 500 years, and they left behind adobo and cooking in vinegar — techniques that, applied to those tropical Asian ingredients, are miraculous.”

A San Francisco food writer wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that Filipino food was "the next big thing." That was in 2010. Almost five years later and the "discovery" of Filipino cuisine is happening in small increments and widely spaced out. Events like the "Balut-Eating Contest" in New York and Savor Filipino as well as the proliferation of food trucks across the country is helping introduce people to sigsig and balut.

Thanks to the recipes handed down from my mother and father-in-law, and the growing 
presence of Asian supermarkets with all the necessary food ingredients I need, the good news (for me) is 
that I don't have to wait for the "next big thing." For everybody else, though: You don't know 
what you're missing.