TGIF Feature:' Halo Halo' visits a Legendary Filipino food stall in Seattle's Pike Place Market.

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Home cooking is the staple in this Seattle eatery.

On a cool, brisk day, there's nothing like a steaming bowl of sinigang, the salty, sour soup I grew up with,. All those memories come flooding back while watching the latest issue of "Halo Halo," Easter's video series about Filipino cuisine.

This week, Francesca Manto visits Oriental Mart Kitchenette, a no-frills food (in a good way) stall that has been a fixture in Seattle's tourist attraction, Pike Place Market, for almost 50 years.

No white tablecloths and black-shirted wait staff here -- just honest, down-home cookin made with love.

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TGIF Feature: Notes while waiting in line for Filipino food

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Francesca Manto interviews Bad Saint chef Tom Cunanan in the newest episode of 'Halo Halo.'

I DON'T KNOW about standing in line for three hours waiting for a restaurant to open is something I can do, but apparently lots of other people are doing it in order to eat at perhaps the best-known Filipino American restaurant in the U.S.

There are only 24 seats in the Washington, D.C. restaurant and no reservations are taken, which explains why people line up early for the 5-star restaurant. "Half the people who come in have never eaten Filipino food before," co-owner Genevieve Villamora says proudly.

It's been two years since Bad Saint was named as one of the best new restaurants in the country but it appears that high standard has been maintained as the waiting line keeps getting longer. Eater, the food-lovers website includes Bad Saint as one of the 38 best in America.

GENEVIEVE VILLAMORA

Eater's Halo Halo, hosted by Francesca Manto visits Bad Saint in its newest episode and speaks to owner Genevieve Villamora and chef Tom Cunanan, who visited the Philippines for the first time only last year. His standard and ideas for cooking come from his late mother. "I think, she'd be proud of me," he says.

Note: The name of the restaurant Bad Saint is derived from Saint Malo, the earliest Filipino settlement in North America, and quite possibly the first Asian American community, founded in 1763 in the Louisiana bayous. Its earliest inhabitants were reportedly Filipino sailors who deserted the Spanish galleons that used to sail to the Philippines from Mexico.

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DENNIS VILLAFRANCA

SOME OF THE POPULAR Filipino food trucks, which are playing an important role of exposing Philippine cuisine to the general public, are taking the next natural step towards brick-and-mortar restaurants.

The Bay Area food truck, Jeepney Guy, will be operating out of a new place in West Oakland to serve its delicious lechon, roasted pig, with its potato-chip-like skin, and other Filipino dishes.

Called 7th West, (1255 7th St.) the space will include a permanent kitchen for Filipino food purveyor Jeepney Guy owner Dennis Villafranca, an outdoor beer garden, a small dog park, and Filipino-inspired cocktails.

The restaurant/bar/event center will allow Villafranca to spread his wings and offer a including fun bar snacks like fried pig ears and chicken nuggets dredged in mochi flour and coconut milk, plus larger rice plates piled with adobo ribs or buttery shrimp. There are a couple of vegan options, too.

The space is a huge 8,500 square feet, with about half of it being an indoor warehouse space that’s part art gallery, bar, restaurant, and arcade. The other half will be transformed to an outdoor event/eating space. The space will open later this summer.

The founders are all Oakland business owners: Pancho Kachingwe is a cofounder of The Hatch, Assan Jethmal is the founder of Good Mother Gallery, and Kevin Pelgone and Donna Brinkman are both from the Overlook Lounge - the latter three are Filipino Americans.

Together, they came up with the idea of having open, outdoor space that can host community events as opposed to a typical bar. “More of a social hub, and we want it to be accessible,” Kachingwe said. “A lot of spaces charge a lot of money to have events. That’s not what we’re going for.”

In addition, there will be a dog run outside. “We want to be so inclusive that even your pets will want to come and hang out,” Pelgone said.

At some point, the owners hope to serve halo-halo, the Filipino shaved ice dessert made with ube ice cream, coconut, sweet beans, and more.

Note: Murals by local artists decorate the inside and outside of the building. West Oakland was once a thriving arts district flush with African American blues and jazz venues, but many local Black-owned businesses were pushed out with the creation of the West Oakand BART station, the post office, and the elevated freeway, as well as more recent redevelopment. 

“We really wanted to do something that revitalized the area, but we’re also cautious of what the area used to be, and not create a space that gentrifies the area, but supports the area,” Kachingwe said.

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Hometown Heroes features the food of Likha.

A COUPLE of miles north of 7th West in Emeryville, the Hometown Heroes sportsbar is sporting a new menu. Likha will take over the kitchen serving a menu of modernized Filipino classics like kare kare and lumpia.

Bobby Punla and Jan Dela Paz are the two chefs behind Likha, which is Tagalog for "to create."

Bobby Punla and Jan Dela Paz.

Punla is a first generation Filipino American from Richmond, while Dela Paz is a native of Manila who has been living in the United States for the past 15 years. Both chefs have extensive fine dining experience: Dela Paz spent almost a decade in the Michelin-starred kitchen of Napa’s La Toque, while Punla worked at NYC’s NoMad restaurant, from the team behind Eleven Madison Park. Eventually, the two met while cooking at Oakland's Ramen Shop.

Inspired by Bad Saint, Punla and Dela Paz are trying different techniques they’ve picked up in fine dining kitchens, and experimenting with plating to add color and texture to classic Filipino dishes — a new shortrib kare kare, a peanut stew with fermented shrimp paste, is topped with crispy, fried tripe, and a longanisa “spam,” is their take on a popular sweet and savory Filipino sausage.

“We thought Filipino food really needed a voice here, something to keep the tradition but show how we could modernize the food,” says Punla. “Filipinos are the second biggest population in the bay area but there are very few Filipino restaurants, unless you go to Daly City where food is coming out of a chafing dish.
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'Eater' launches 'Halo Halo' series on Filipino cuisine

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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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