A century ago: A dinner celebrating the Philippines - without Filipino food

IF YOU'VE EVER BEEN to a Filipino household, the first or second question you're asked as you slip off your shoes, is: "Have you eaten?"

Right away, even if you are not hungry, you're swept to the kitchen table and fed whatever is on the stove or something from the fridge that can be heated up right away. You'd be wise not to refuse a helping or two if you don't want to risk offending the host or hostess.

That's why it was curious to note that 100 years ago today (Aug. 20), one of the first official State dinners held in Washington D.C occurred ... and there was no Filipino food!!!! That says a lot about the tenor of the times and the relationship between the U.S. and its newly acquired colony in the far side of the Pacific.

It seems stranger still because today, Filipino cuisine is enjoying a moment in foodie circles, spurred on by the success of food trucks, pop-up restaurants and the efforts of the Filipino Food Movement, a group trying to push Filipino food beyond the traditional boundaries of the turo-turo (literally: "point-point) markets and mom-and-pop restaurants.

RELATED: 

• Filipino food: the Rodney Dangerfield of ethnic cuisines
• Savor Filipino 2014 in San Francisco
• Filipino food gaining fans on both coasts

The Food Movement's event, Savor Filipino (more on this in an upcoming post) is augmented by the rise of some restaurants that have garnered the attention of food critics, including Maharlika in New York City and D.C.'s Bad Saint was named the second-best new restaurant in the country by Bon Appétit.

EDITOR'S NOTE: There are so many Filipino restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles area that the debate can go on-and-on which one is the best. It is like asking which is the best Chinese restaurant? It is impossible to reach a consensus, it seems everyone has their favorite. Readers, tell me: Which and where is the Best Filipino Restaurant?

Researching the history of Filipinos in Washington is a hobby for Erwin Tiongson, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and his wife, Titchie Carandang-Tiongson. 

Their effort to recreate the historic dinner was featured in the Washington Post recently:

It was a marvelous dinner. One hundred guests, many of whom were senators or generals. An ornate banquet room in the Willard Hotel and floral arrangements of magnolias, dahlias and lilies of the valley. There was chicken Perigueux and potato Lorette, ham and an array of salads, and, for dessert, a peach mousse and petits fours. The date? Aug. 30, 1916.

One hundred years ago, this grand party at the Willard was thrown by Manuel L. Quezon, the resident commissioner who represented the Philippines in the United States, which acquired the colony following the Spanish-American War. But the Jones Act of 1916, authored by Virginia congressman William Jones, established America’s commitment to the Philippines’ independence and structured its legislature. The bill had been signed that morning, and the next morning, Quezon would depart for Manila. The dinner was his farewell.

Researching the history of Filipinos in Washington is a hobby for Erwin Tiongson, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and his wife, Titchie Carandang-Tiongson. It’s an effort “to make Filipino-American history a little bit more tangible and immediate to people who care about those things, including our two children,” Tiongson said.

They first learned of the dinner in a coffee-table book and then dug through old Filipino newsletters and magazines, encountering lengthy accounts of the dinner, recalling all of the speeches, the gifts, the aforementioned flower arrangements and the menu. Along with Hank Hendrickson, executive director of the US Philippines Society, they realized that they had enough information to reenact the dinner on its centennial. The menu, which was printed in French in the Philippine Review, was as follows:

Reenacting the dinner is a more immersive way for the embassy’s guests — which will include Jones’s descendants — to experience the era they are celebrating.

“You’re getting a chance to experience living in it rather than reading about it,” said Bruce Reynolds, president of the Culinary Historians of Washington D.C. Dishes from 100 years ago weren’t radically different from what we eat now, though “cooking today, I’d say, has more layers of flavor.”

Did that little introduction whet your appetite? To read the rest of the article, click here. 

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Filipino food gaining fans on opposite coasts

Jeepney & Maharlika, Manhattan, New York City

I'VE EATEN at Jeepney; haven't gone to Maharlika yet. 

Jeepney is worth a stop if you're in New York. If you ever wondered why so many Filipino dishes are kinda luke-warm, that's because they were originally meant to be eaten by kamay (hand). You don't want heat blisters from eating, right? Jeepney has a pub-like ambiance and features a kamayan meal on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Its gotten so popular you have to make reservations. Check out their website for more details on those finger-licking meals. Those t-shirts are so cool!

NOTE: Bring wet wipes.

Besides, any restaurant recommended by the Smithsonian Museum website is a place that deserves our attention. 

CORRECTION: Earlier versions of this post said it was the Guggenheim Museum. My apologies.

If Jeepney is your casual dining experience, just a block away is its sister restaurant,  Maharlika, which serves "modern" Filipino fare in your rich auntie's dining room. (Read "upscale.") I know, Filipino food CAN be upscale. You have to use utensils; no one will blink an eye if you ask for the big spoon, too.

Together, the restaurants have teamed up to sponsor the popular Balut-Eating Contest during the 1st Ave. Street Fair. Winners have come as far away as ... uh, exotic Queens.

Both restaurants are the brainchildren of California transplant Nicole Ponseca. Favorable reviews by local media have given it New York stamp of approval and the much sought-after gotta-try, foodie status.

Is a San Francisco branch in the future? "It would be so good to come back home," says Ponseca, who attended the University of San Francisco.

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Newcomers to Filipino cuisine sometimes complain that there isn't enough vegetable dishes. Are you kidding me?

Patio Filipino, San Bruno, California

BACK WEST, in the San Francisco Bay Area where there are more Filipinos than New York, Filipino cuisine is having to struggle against intense comparisons with other exotic Asian cuisines. First it was Chinese food, then Japanese, then Vietnamese, followed by Thai, Indian and Malaysian. Even esoteric Ethiopean, Burmese and Cambodian restaurants get more attention. When will Filipino food get the respect it deserves?

Nevetheless, in my never-ending quest for good eats, no matter the nationality, I think I found the best Filipino restaurant in the Bay Area. Patio Filipino is better than your nanay's cooking. Read my Yelp review here. It also got good reviews from the public television's award-winning foodie hit, Check, Please. Check it out below.

RELATED POSTS: 
Adobo and lumpia in the White House
Savor Filipino, 2014

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.

Champion eats 40 balut in 5 minutes

Balut is a duck egg with a partially formed fetus inside.

IF YOU WATCH "Fear Factor" or "Survivor," there's always an eating challenge that normally features balut, a fertilized duck egg with the embryo partially formed. 

I have to admit, I've never eaten balut. a street food favorite in the Philippines. Depending on how far the fetus has formed, you might have to pick the bones and feathers out of from between your teeth. 

The proper way to attack the egg, is to make a small opening first at the top of balut. Then, you're supposed to suck out the juices first before peeling off the rest of the eggshell and dining on the rest of it.

It doesn't sound or look appetizing does it? Unfortunately, to the vast majority of non-Filipino Americans, this is the only exposure they have to Filipino food.

This posting is in honor of Filipino American History Month which is October, commemorating the first arrival of Filipinos on America's soil. It is also in honor of my sister whose favorite memory of her childhood was a balut vendor walking through her Santo Tomas neighborhood in Manila yelling out, "Bah-lu-u-ut! Bah-lu-u-ut!" His cry would bring out the neighbors to purchase the warm duck egg.

A lot of the Filipino food stores in America now offer the Filipino ... er ... delicacy for its customers craving for a bit of homeland authenticity. Besides testing your intestinal fortitude and gag reflex, balut is also supposed to have restorative powers to the male ego.

Wayne Algenio, champion balut eater

Oftentimes, it is eaten as a beer appetizer -- lots of beer -- the way some bars have pickled hard-boiled eggs as a munchie.

Last month, two Filipino restaurants in New York, Jeepney and Maharlika, combined forces to sponsor the Third Annual Balut-Eating Contest at the Hester Street Fair. You can read about it at the NBC news site.

Filipino-American Wayne Algenio from Queens, N.Y. won the contest downing 40 balut in five minutes. He's won the eating contest three years straight. It tastes like boiled eggs, he says.

Sponsor Nicole Ponseca of Maharlika recalls her embarrassment eating Filipino food during school lunchtime. She wants to promote Filipino cuisine to the American palate, says, "If I can make Filipino food accessible to non-Filipinos, it will help garner self-esteem for young Filipnos growing up."

Below, watch the champion in action.