Filipino food: where to start, and where to eat it

That is an advantage. You get to meet a whole cuisine without any preconceptions, and it is not the cuisine people expect.

What it actually tastes like

Filipino food is sour and garlicky rather than hot. The defining flavours are vinegar, calamansi lime, soy, fish sauce, garlic and coconut milk. Chilli exists, mostly in Bicol, and it is not the organising principle it is in Thailand.

The other thing to understand is the history in the plate. Three hundred years of Spanish rule, centuries of Chinese trade before and through it, Malay foundations underneath and an American period on top. Adobo is a Spanish word applied to a pre-Hispanic technique of preserving meat in vinegar. Pancit is Chinese noodles. Lumpia is a spring roll. Leche flan is a custard. The result is genuinely its own thing rather than a set of borrowings.

Rice is at every meal including breakfast, and garlic fried rice at seven in the morning with a fried egg and cured pork is one of the best breakfasts in Asia.

The ten dishes to start with

1. Sinigang. A sour tamarind broth with pork, prawn or fish and vegetables. If you order one thing in the Philippines, order this. It is the dish Filipinos abroad miss most and it explains the whole cuisine in a bowl.
2. Adobo. Meat braised in vinegar, soy, garlic, bay and black pepper. Every family makes it differently and every region argues about it. Order whichever version the place in front of you cooks.
3. Kinilaw. Raw fish cured in vinegar and calamansi with ginger, chilli and often coconut milk. Older than ceviche and sharper. Best on the coast, eaten within an hour of the boat coming in.
4. Lechon. Whole roast pig, and in Cebu it is genuinely one of the great roast meats anywhere, seasoned inside with lemongrass and herbs so it needs no sauce. This is not a tourist claim.
5. Kare-kare. Oxtail in a thick peanut and annatto sauce, eaten with bagoong, a salty fermented shrimp paste that you add yourself. The paste is the point.
6. Sisig. Chopped pork face and ear, crisped, sour with calamansi, served on a sizzling plate. From Pampanga, and the best drinking food in the country.
7. Pancit. Noodles, in a dozen regional forms. Pancit palabok with its orange shrimp sauce and crushed pork crackling is the one to start with.
8. Inasal. Bacolod’s grilled chicken, marinated in calamansi, vinegar and annatto, eaten with garlic rice and a dipping sauce you mix yourself at the table.
9. Bicol express. Pork with coconut milk and a serious quantity of chilli. The exception to the not-hot rule and worth seeking out.
10. Halo-halo. Shaved ice, evaporated milk, sweet beans, jellies, purple yam ice cream and crushed rice flakes, stirred into a mess. It looks chaotic and it is the correct response to a March afternoon.

Where the regions differ

Manila and the surrounding provinces. The full national repertoire, plus the Chinese tradition. Binondo, the oldest Chinatown in the world, is the single best eating walk in the country: fried siopao, kiampong rice, lumpia, hopia and dumplings, in an hour and a half on foot. We build it into most Manila days.

Pampanga, two hours north of Manila, is the acknowledged culinary province and an excellent day out of the capital. Sisig, tocino, morcon, and a level of technical cooking that surprises people.

Cebu and the Visayas. Lechon, obviously, and grilled seafood by the kilo at the markets, where you choose the fish and pay someone to grill it. Larsian in Cebu City is the classic version of that.

Bicol. The chilli and coconut region, and the only part of the country where the food is consistently hot. Laing, taro leaves in coconut milk, is the dish to order.

Ilocos, in the north. Bagnet, a slab of pork belly deep fried until it shatters, and pinakbet, vegetables with fermented fish. Vigan longganisa, a garlicky sausage, is the best in the country.

The Cordilleras. Etag, salt-cured smoked pork, and pinikpikan, which is a ritual chicken dish and worth reading about before you order it. Mountain food, quite different from the lowlands.

Mindanao and the south. Malay and Indonesian influence, turmeric and coconut, and the food most visitors never reach.

Where to eat, practically

Carinderias are the small local eateries where dishes sit in trays and you point at two of them over rice. Two to four dollars, excellent, and the best way to eat widely without a menu you cannot read. Choose the busy one at lunchtime.

Markets are where the seafood happens. You buy the fish at one stall and pay a stall behind to grill it, which costs almost nothing and is the best meal on many islands.

Resort restaurants are where the money goes, and on a small island the resort is frequently the only kitchen within reach. That is a genuine cost of choosing the quiet bay and it belongs in the budget. See what two weeks in the Philippines really costs.

The modern Filipino restaurants in Manila and Cebu are worth a night. There is a generation of chefs doing serious work with regional ingredients, and it is the best argument against the idea that this is a peasant cuisine with nowhere to go.

The honest note: what is overrated

Balut. The fertilised duck egg. It exists, it is a genuine street food, and it has become a dare that visitors are filmed eating. If you want to try it, try it. If you are only doing it for the story, you are participating in something slightly tiresome and there are twenty better things on the same street.

The tourist buffet dinner with a cultural show. Common in Manila and on Boracay, and the food is the least good version of everything on this page.

Boracay’s beachfront restaurants. A long strip of adequate international food at inflated prices. The good eating on Boracay is inland, in D’Mall’s back lanes and at the market.

Anything advertised as “the best halo-halo in the Philippines”. Every province claims it. They are mostly all fine.

Chocolate Hills viewpoint food. Not a dish, a warning. Bring lunch or eat in Loboc.

Dietary requirements, said honestly

Vegetarians should plan ahead rather than improvise. Pork stock, fish sauce and shrimp paste are in a great deal of everyday cooking, including vegetable dishes, and the concept is less familiar here than in Thailand or Vietnam. It is entirely workable when restaurants are chosen and briefed in advance, which our Manila office does as a matter of course, and the resorts on the islands are used to the request.

The genuinely easy wins: grilled fish and seafood everywhere, excellent tropical fruit, and Chinese-influenced vegetable and noodle dishes in Binondo.

Serious allergies need writing down. Peanut is in kare-kare and in some sauces, shellfish paste is in more dishes than a menu will say, and bagoong turns up as a condiment without being listed.

Two things worth building into the trip

A Binondo food walk in Manila, with a guide, on foot, in the morning. Two to three hours, ten or twelve stops, and it converts most people to the cuisine on day one. This is the single best food experience in the country and it costs very little.

A market morning in Cebu or Bacolod before a cooking session. Less polished than the Thai equivalent and more interesting, because the ingredients are unfamiliar and someone has to explain them.

Culture and food, 13 days is built around both, along with Banaue, Sagada and Vigan.

Plan this trip

Tell us how you like to eat and our Manila office will build the markets, the walks and the restaurants into the route rather than leaving them to chance. Free first proposal, no obligation.

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Keep reading

• The Philippines: the complete guide to planning your trip
• The Philippines for the first time
• What we would skip in the Philippines
• Culture and food, 13 days
• Classic Philippines in 14 days
• All our Philippines trips

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