'Eater' launches 'Halo Halo' series on Filipino cuisine

SCREEN CAPTURE / EATER

Francesca Manto hosts new online series about the cuisine that she grew up up eating.

DON'T TELL Francesca Manto that Filipino cuisine is a trend. 

Manto is Filipino American, and in recent years she’s seen an outpour of trend pieces touting Filipino food as the next-big-thing, and has dealt with people asking her a variation of the following question multiple times: “Well why is Filipino food not as mainstream as, like (Substitute Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Peruvian) ... Mexican food?

She’ll answer you in two parts. First she’ll recall the difficulty her family faced after opening and closing a set of Filipino restaurants in Los Angeles in the 1990s, upon first arriving to the States. She’ll also argue that previous representations of Filipino food have failed us all because of inaccuracy — one of the tentpole reasons she created and developed a new video series, Halo Halo, for Eater, the website that caters to foodies.

With no disrespect to the late Anthony Bourdain and Bizarre Foods host Andrew Zimmerman, both of whom predicted that Filipino food would be "the next big thing."

“The people who make those trend statement aren’t Filipino,” she says. “It’s vital that it be represented by Filipinos who grew up with the culture, and want to represent it.”

Halo Halo is a four-part series that explores the changing landscape of Filipino food in America, according to the website. 

Halo halo is the name of a cold Filipino dessert of shaved ice, evaporated milk, sweetened beans, jello topped by ice cream of your choice (usually mango and ube.) The term itself translates to mix-mix, because that's the way you're supposed to eat it -- mix up all the ingredients and then spoon it into your mouth.

As host and producer for the series, Manto is talking to the Filipino and Filipino-American chef and owners who are running restaurants across the northeast.

She was inspired by Bad Saint — the four year old Washington, D.C. phenomenon that’s one of Eater's 38 essential restaurants across America. It was the first time Manto heard of a Filipino restaurant truly getting national buzz. “I thought, ‘Wow! People are lining up for Filipino food’,” she remembers.

Hearing about Bad Saint in 2014 led Manto to her rediscovery of the food she’s been eating since she was born. “I realized how much I don’t know about Filipino food,” she recalls. 

After all, how do you define "traditional" dishes when the cuisine itself is constantly evolving. Today's Filipino cuisine is an amalgamation of American, on top of Japanese, on top of Chinese on top of Indonesian on top of indigenous cuisines.

“Food in the Philippines is evolving differently, chef’s here are going off of memory,” she says about the restaurants featured in Halo Halo like Bad Saint and New York’s Purple Yam. “Food should evolve just as much as a culture, and it’s making these menus very diverse.”

Brooklyn's Purple Yam's adobo, the Philippines' national dish.

Now that production has wrapped on the first four episodes, Manto is interested in visiting cities outside the northeast, and highlighting the Filipino-American communities there. 

"I'm visiting Purple Yam in the very first episode of Halo Halo, and talking to (Amy) Besa about how food in the Philippines both unites and differentiates the country’s more than 7,000 islands," says Manto. "She tells me why it’s difficult to define 'authenticity,' and how Filipino food in America is, in so many ways, its own version of 'halo-halo.'"

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