Exploring Southeast Asia's Most Unappreciated Cuisine

[Music] they say you've never feasted until you've feasted in the Philippines all right I don't know if anybody actually says that but they should it's a lifetime memory one of the real high points in the world of food the Philippines is a country as in love with eating as anywhere on earth a place where life revolves around family friends and absolutely epic meals yet somehow in the global culinary landscape the food of the second largest country in all of Southeast Asia is ignored insulted and

massively misunderstood even though for years it's been supposedly the next big thing today we're in Bangkok Thailand a city where Cooks servers and managers from the Philippines work in some of the world's best restaurants but where the food of their own country is hidden far outside the mainstream so we're diving in in search of the best of one of my favorite Cuisines anywhere exploring the city's Pinoy subculture and bringing our appetite for a day of feasting like well like we're in the [Mu

sic] Philippines this is the Philippines it's a country of 7,641 islands in the Western Pacific Ocean and we'll start with the natural resources before they spread everywhere among the plants native to the Philippines are Tero Ginger turmeric a dozen forms of citrus and the coconut now there were indigenous people on the islands but the story of the cuisine starts about 5,000 years ago when a group arrived called the austronesians who would come on boats from Taiwan bringing rice farming paper m

aking and sugar cane as they seem to have had a sweet tooth the austronesians built the first permanent settlements and genetically they still make up the majority of the population today they were the famous seaf farers who traded across the region and by 2000 BC they brought jack fruit from java bananas from New Guinea pigs from China and chickens from Thailand as a side note from the Philippines many would continue on to explore much of the world and settle Islands far and wide today their de

scendants are known to choose just a few examples as the Mala the Hawaiian the mai and even the malagi of Madagascar anyway their Cuisine was based around rice seafood and 100 uses of the coconut especially fermented into vinegar and used for preservation more on that later around the year 1000 the Chinese started building trading posts throughout the islands and introduced soy sauce tofu and bean sprouts as well as dishes like egg rolls and noodles then came the Spanish with their own dishes an

d techniques and most significantly their gallan trade route linking Manila to Mexico making the Philippines the gateway to Asia for so many new world crops before gaining independence in 1946 the Philippines would be colonized seized or invaded by the Spanish British American and Japanese and all of them would leave their own marks on the food and when you put it all together you end up with something that doesn't really look like anything else on Earth it's 10:00 in the morning at a restaurant

called calamansi Cafe in bango's sator District a family run business from two sisters from seu it's been open for about a year and it's one of maybe a half dozen places in this entire city serving food from the Philippines and here well this is about as authentic as it gets and the perfect place for us to start our day it's been 4 years since I've been in the Philippines a place I once consulted on a restaurant and where I've studied the food and culture once even opening a Filipino place of m

y own anyway 4 years is a long time and it's long enough that I've already made an enormous mistake with this plan shoot see normally on OTR when we have an idea for a video we'll make a list of places we want to film and then spend our day running around from shop to shop trying one or two Specialties then moving on to the next one but that's not how Food Works in the Philippines unless you're just looking for fried chicken or a plate of pansit and a San Miguel to really appreciate the cuisine

you have to be prepared to Feast there's a term into gallog that describes the Filipino way of eating it's a phrase called Tarana and it implies how you enjoy food when you're with friends or family in English Tarana translates to let's go we hadn't even started eating and already the day was lost I was at the mercy of Tarana you guys don't do things small in the Philippines there is no such thing as like a light breakfast this is a feast and it's our first meal of the day well in Philippines we

go big it's all about like it's all about family friends and sharing and enjoying especially with food so there is no way you can make Filipino food like small cuz then it loses is the essence of what Filipino food [Music] is is there an order you would recommend should we go lighter to to Stronger is there something that we should have first or do we just start eating if you want to go with a Kila I mean appetizer be this one and kinilaw but honestly no Filipino food is fun there's really not

like a lot of like you know like order to it so you go as it is like you would in eating and like you know your F your family you're enjoying celebrating anything celebrating life so you guys are going to join us for this right we can't do this alone this is like this is a lot for for three of [Music] us the reason we started the video with the geopolitical path of the Philippines is because here every dish tells its own unique story there's Kenny Lao found by archaeologists dating back to the o

riginal austronesians raw fish dressed with coconut or sugar cane vinegar and citrus in fact it's this dish that inspired what we know in the west as Ceviche which originated in Peru but for thousands of years was made using fermented banana passion fruit until of course the Spanish brought Citrus and this technique from the Philippines that's not the only ancient dish on the table there's dried and salted milkfish marinated for days in vinegar and seasoning before being deep fried originally Fi

sherman's food in coastal Luzon adobo began as an offshoot of Kena pork preserved in vinegar originally it was salted a technique that still exists called White adobo but this is where we start to see the influence of the foreigners the Chinese brought soy sauce and the Spanish added garlic and the technique of searing the meat before brazing today adobo is considered perhaps the national dish and here it served topped with more adobo dried and shredded Ki KI comes from the years in the 1760s wh

en the British occupied Manila they brought Indian soldiers to help with the conquest but a lot of those soldiers deserted and eventually married into Filipino families they'd make curries using local ingredients like peanuts and overtime as they converted to Catholicism oxtail became the protein of choice kiari like a lot of Pinoy Foods is seasoned with Bon or Filipino shrimp paste which has its origins of course in Thailand brought by Traders around the year 1100 bulak loak uses pork intestine

favored by the Chinese boiled sauteed and then deep fried in the style of Spanish chicharon and topped with garlic and cafir lime leaves sisig is a real trip across the Millennia it started as a salad made from New World ingredients like like guava and papaya prepared in the austronesian way of using vinegar and citrus but it didn't take on its modern form until as recently as the 1930s when locals in Angeles City started making use of pigh heads discarded by American soldiers stationed at Clar

k Air Force Base and pck bet manages to combine everything local seafood vegetables from China Europe and Mexico and shrimp paste from Thailand you put it together along with three kinds of rice and a big plate of barbecued meat and it's enough to make you wonder how this stuff coming from a country of 110 million people with a massive overseas diaspora has managed to stay such a secret you know there's been this thing forever in The Culinary world you know I remember it was it was in the 9s the

first time that Anthony Bourdain predicted that Filipino food was going to be the next thing that was going to take over the world you know and actually sisting was the dish that he said was going to be the next dish that everybody knew about right and it feels like going all the way back to the days after World War II when heavy waves of Filipino migration to the US started um it it's always been every generation has predicted that Filipino food will make the main stream yes and the fact that

it hasn't yet feels almost like a it's just a fluke it's an accident there's no reason I can identify why that is but what's your theory why why is it that when you fly to Los Angeles or London or to to any of the the major International cities you know Filipino food is not as prominent or not as understood as so many other Cuisines why why is that I think it's because like a lot of the Filipinos that fly into other cities they're working so it's like we call it the overseas Filipino workers and

they're all always intent on sending money home um bringing uh bringing their family in so that's really their main goal so know opening a restaurant is a risk so mostly a lot of it is going to be like home cooking in fact uh we also have a lot of guests that say oh we should open up a restaurant and so and so in Australia because I want to be able to bring my friends there so I think it's just because the way the Filipino the the population Filipinos are moving to different uh countries it's j

ust that it's more about home cooking or the very very simple restaurants that might be a little bit too uh different or a little bit too like a foreign and might intimidate other so that's why if you see the ones that actually made it mainstream uh I think in um New York they do I think this guy he does a tacos he makes it he makes it more he makes it more relatable more American but at the same time you also lose the essence of what Filipino Cuisine is cuz in know in a way I mean it's still Fi

lipino ingredients but it's in the shape of a a f taco or a burrito so I think and it's very hard to understand uh understand a Cuisine when it's already like Fusion wise so I think also Filipino food has a very bad W globally you know I mean even my my friends here in Bangkok are you know overseas they they they don't have a very positive uh image of like uh you know Filipino food they think it's too oily it's mainly just all meats you know like just everything fried like mainly they they think

it's fried chicken or like big chunks of pork but actually there's a another side for the Filipino Cuisine that actually we do want to highlight which is the healthy stuff or the grilled dishes that that we love or the steam you know do we consider this a healthy meal well at least we have veggies it's it's a balanced meal yeah so [Music] yeah this is this is stupid how goodness this is my new favorite Filipino dish this is so good yeah absolutely this is insane how good this [Music] is now I w

ould love for this video to just continue on this path eating some incredible Cuisine then going home happy but the truth is there's an elephant in the room we have to bring up and I'm not just talking about me after this meal if it's the fact that in spite of all of this in spite of so much tradition in history and so many incredible dishes Filipino food isn't really unknown so much as despised and as unfair as that might be well we can't tell this story without confronting that [Music] subject

all right in case you're not familiar with the global stereotypes of Filipino food the short version is it's pretty Grim according to General wisdom it's the only place in Southeast Asia where the food sucks the country with beautiful beaches fast food and a bunch of deep fried it's hard to rationalize what we just ate with the public perception but it's pretty much understood that the Philippines are the black sheep of Southeast Asian Cuisine now there's a lot of reasons given and I'll try to

take on at least a few of them all right first this is understandable I mean it was my own first impression arriving in Manila it's not like Bangkok or panang where all around you see the best of Local Foods just waiting to be explored but this has more to do with culture than Cuisine there are good restaurants don't get me wrong but in general the Philippines is a tight-knit place and meals are usually eaten at home restaurants are functional fast food and places called karenderia is meant for

the local working class to spend a few pizos on a cheap lunch for the best stuff you need to know somebody all I see are burgers ERS and fried chicken well in tourist areas that's pretty much true but don't forget the Philippines were an American colony until the 1940s almost everywhere else when visitors arrived vendors and restaurant owners tried to find a way to appeal to the foreign pallet in the Philippines they already knew how to do it so you are served a bunch of inauthentic stuff when y

ou're there but it's because it's what you want not what they eat if Filipino food was any good it wouldn't be so hard to find overseas again it's true it's not common in the US and in the rest of the world it's almost invisible but again there is a reason just a few weeks ago we did a story on Burmese migrants in the path of food takes to the mainstream when migrants arrive in a new country looking for a better life a lot of the time there's not much work available if they don't speak the langu

age they're pretty much limited to manual labor or maybe opening a small restaurant for the other migrants then over time and with enough visibility the food might become Exempted then absorbed into the culture that's the story of stuff like Chinese and Italian to name two examples but even though there are a lot of Filipino migrants about 10 million in total don't forget the national language is English and there's always a high demand for English speakers willing to work on a migrant salary in

fields like education Child Care retail and especially ironically enough restaurants it's an Open Secret that high-end or foreign focused FNB across Asia might collapse without Filipino staff and I don't think that's an exaggeration so the point is the food hasn't reached the global mainstream because overseas that first step in the process never happened and number four well this is a lot more complicated in some ways it goes back to the home cooking culture but there's a more complex reason w

hy the best local dishes are not front and center let's go all the way back to the 1500s when the Spanish took control of the islands it's easy today to talk about dishes they introduced but at the time it wasn't an introduction so much as a forest assimilation the Spanish referred to local cuisine as primitive and inferior local Filipinos and public settings were made to cook Spanish dishes and old tradition survived only in family homes and private Gatherings then the Americans arrived and if

anything it got worse there are writings from Helen Heron Taft the future us first lady and at the time the wife of the American governor who stay that the Filipinos were Savages who must be made to learn proper cuisine in fact in those years home economics was made compulsory for girls in Filipino schools so that they could learn how to cook food with a proper Western refinement which judging by what the Americans Left Behind was hot dogs in spam anyway for 400 years Filipino people were basica

lly second class citizens in their own country and so they stuck together feasting on their own Foods was a form of rebellion and there was real Rebellion too I mean history is full of stories of local people rising up fighting back and never losing their own proud identity hell even mellin was killed in the Philippines just 40 days after claiming the land for the Spanish and the man who killed him a warrior named lau lau would be honored in the most Filipino way possible they named a fish after

him the grouper because I'm telling you food is a serious business so what all this means is that if you're in the Philippines you might be right around the corner from really great food without ever actually knowing it and that's the case overseas too in Bangkok there's one neighborhood that's the country's only true Filipino Enclave it's called priy officially priy banomyong hugging the northern part of sukumvit 71 between eami and prong now it doesn't look like a typical migrant cluster ther

e's not a lot of outward signs that you you've arrived anywhere different from the rest of the city but within a handful of alleys it's where a large portion of the city's 30,000 Filipinos reside here there are supposedly a handful of restaurants though I have no idea how to find them as most of them are unmarked and inside family homes but there is one reason we came here and that's because within bangkok's Pinoy Community everyone knows that for the most authentic home-cooked stuff you have to

find the house of a woman named Delia and her husband Ramy to the untrained eye it's almost invisible an unassuming house along a winding alley off soy priy 26 but inside it's actually the oldest Filipino restaurant still open in Thailand making their dishes since 2003 so old school that we had to order a day in advance not just so Delia could prepare the right ingredients but because so many of the things she serves take hours to make sometimes even starting the the night [Music] before what's

the secret why do you stay open for so long why why is it just good food uh actually we cook just simple simple cooking just like a normal but God help us to cook this one that's why The Taste is good anyway I don't have any secret just simple [Music] cooking this is a restaurant called new mauai and it wasn't always here for a while they operated on a busy street in pratunam but during Co went back to their humble Origins cooking in a house for friends neighbors and those in the [Music] know t

here's something special about eating in this way walking in through a cluttered front porch to find Delia in the back cooking where by the way she's more than happy to share every single detail of her recipes I mean all you've got to is ask and then sitting down at a table with Ramy and hearing his unique take on world politics while surrounded by the incredible smells coming out of the kitchen it's fun and honestly there's something about this way of eating that makes the food somehow taste ev

en better and this is just my my theory I don't know maybe I'm wrong mhm in Thailand uh 90% of the meals you eat you take away or you eat out people buy their col gang bring it home you know eat on the street eat at restaurant restaurant culture in my exp I don't you know the Philippines more than I do I've only been a couple of times but I have had some of the best meals of my life in the Philippines M but they're in somebody's house they're at a party they're at a social everybody likes to hav

e the party get together exactly not restaurant culture it's family culture it's a little bit different and crazy or is that would you agree agree agree with that 100% you are right usually Filipino mostly the Filipinos they gather together for some uh anniversary or what not for food the food is there just to add spices to the Celebration but Filipino people love to get [Music] together I I've had Filipino friends have eaten in their before mm this is exactly exactly the same exactly the same e

xactly the same I've never had honestly I've never had in a restaurant taste like this except in the Philippines but and this is this is this is the same it's the same it's exactly right so tell me a little bit about your family's food what would your mom cook when you were growing up what were your memories of the food that you seven years I know already how to cook because my mother loved to cook also and then I just watching mhm your food is very ordinary yeah ordinary for 20 years it's only

dried fish and rice dried fish fish tell the truth yeah it's true from my mother my father's only my mother's only housekeeper and then my mom my my father is only a farmer we are from poor people that time I'm helping to like gardening uh you know the rice sped I I know how to do it because menu is very simple and then before even I'm go to school I don't have any money to pay so I just bring you know the potato oh I go to school I bring potato for my lunch really because I don't have like this

if I I we just eat the rice only lunchtime and then if we rice fell my father say stop to school 4 days why I say no just help your brother to to making the this one the rice SP so sometime I cry I go to teacher teacher I'm so sorry you cannot go to school for days because we just rice SP my teacher okay okay but every year we have P two piso but we don't have two piso I tell to my teacher what I'm going to do my teacher say okay I help you wash my clothes and then I'm the one to pee so I do li

ke that both Delia and Ramy came from poor backgrounds and it was only through hard work and a lucky set of circumstances that brought them a better life for Ramy the first in his family to finish secondary school he worked his way into a career as an engineer coming to Thailand to work on state-run projects in the 1990s Delia learned the recipes of foods that for her family were too expensive thanks to her older sister who built her own successful career after leaving home and sadly this is the

other reason why Filipino Cuisine has never really broken through for the people on the islands life isn't always easy and few Outsiders actually really explore the country because to do so is to confront some of the most shocking poverty on the continent it's not always safe in the cities to explore too far by foot with some of Asia's highest crime rates including a murder rate that just a few years ago reached about 9.5 out of 100,000 the same as Iraq and while the per capita GDP is around $3

,500 a year already 00 24th in the world over 40% of the population survives on less than $2 a day you don't find the best local Cuisine front and center when you land in the country because the country itself is just trying to survive but of course it's still the Philippines which means that even under the worst of circumstances food is still a source of national pride well pride and family arguments somebody watches this video they've never experienced Filipino food before what do you want the

m to know what what would you want them to to know about the Philippines to know about the food yeah actually you were right in the beginning that this kind of food is just evolutionary we get it from other countries but this one definitely comes from Japan no and then we dve that one not in because you know in my Province we have a lot of fish mhm we just go and cut we just put the onion if you don't have money to buy some onion we just put like this like by the Japanese yeah even me I'm a smal

l kids we go to the in history you don't for don't forget that we were conquered by the Japanese and they introduced this food to [Music] us the neighborhood where new mauh is located is in the heart of a Philippino community that officially numbers around 20,000 but unofficially might be at least twice that number for anyone away from the Philippines for the first time even with English language skills adjusting can be difficult I mean as we've already covered it's a unique place with a very in

dependent culture and walking around pretty when you know what you're looking for you can start to see signs of what that experience might be like on the ground floor of a nearby Office Building there's bangkok's only Filipino Supermarket palen the Tagalog word for Market he here they sell everything from canned Meats to seasonings to pretty much whatever tastes like home at pelen they sell Frozen milkfish sweet desserts and the breads from their own Bakery stuff found across the Philippines and

specifically from the city of Elo Elo when we visited the shelves were pretty much empty and that's the nature of one shop servicing such a large migrant population but a couple of days later the manager was nice enough to send me a cell phone video of when their new stock arrived for the week just before it would all be snapped up as it always is at this point we were pretty much done we'd been eating since we woke up and there's only so much one canara in a single day we'd planned to have our

next meals in pratunam the home of two Filipino restaurants including Toto in AEL which serves some of the best grilled chicken in a city full of amazing grilled chicken but we figured our own Survival would take priority so we'd finish with just one more meal this time maybe not a Homestyle Feast but a classic example of what it's really like to actually eat at a restaurant in a place like Manila so we loosened our belts and headed over to the gates of the Filipino Embassy for one final [Music

] stop so we had our gigantic amazing elegant Filipino Feast to begin we had our home style also Feast second and and I'm finishing today the way that you know what would what would be a classic meal if you were just working in uh in uh Manila or seu or anywhere else in the Philippines and that would be a plate of noodles and a [Music] beard I think thing that hopefully you've seen today you know sometimes it's frustrating when when there's a dish like Tom yam like we did in our last video I can

generally assume that you watching have some reference point to the flavor you know you can see what we're eating and you can have some general idea what it tastes like because you know most people know tomyum right it's just a dish that's gone Global the hard thing for me with a show like today is that unless you are from the Philippines or unless you've really spent time there you know there's a very good chance that you're looking at this food and and you don't have a reference point I mean

I didn't have a reference point if I just saw this before I there were dishes I tried today that I'd never had before ever you know the the chicken stew from our last place that we just visited right that was a new one on me you know and it was delicious and it did not taste like what it looked like you know and and if there's one thing I wish I was better at it's that I wish there was a vocabulary that I knew you know we all know that sour sweet salty spicy bitter Umami you know but that's not

always going to do justice to what somebody tastes like and and I think Filipino food has its own completely unique you know it's not mild but it's not overpowering in any One Direction you know that's the interesting thing about Filipino food is it's its own flavor profile you can taste something thing and immediately be like I don't know how to describe this but it's clearly from the Philippines you know and I think maybe the way I would probably describe it best would be meaty you know the em

phasis is on the meat it's it's a it's a very Primal cuisine in terms of how much is centered around the actual flavor of the meat and I love that about it um and it's interesting how that has withstood the influence of the Spanish the influence of the Chinese the connections to all the other Southeast St countries the uh Center of global trade that it has been for so long uh that it still has its very unique characteristics and flavor profiles and preferences and textures and tastes and dishes

that nobody else has uh and yeah I you know you can't ignore Filipino food when you talk about the great Cuisines of Southeast Asia that is for sure um and I hope one day we get a chance to explore it in the Philippines and I'm sure that will be a completely different Adventure that will put on a lot of kilos onto atam because today we have only been to two restaurants before this and I am as stuffed as I have ever been on this channel but guess what for you it's Del [Music] leeting and I ordere

d I ordered dessert too because there's no Filipino video without H [Music] Hollow I'm shocked that all I've eaten today I have no trouble eating this it's actually pretty it's actually pretty [Music] good I got a bean got I got a put a appears to be a red kidy [Music] bean got some [Music] corn I mean it's a [Music] salad subscribe to the channel for more from OTR please consider supporting us on patreon it really helps to keep us going and thank you so much to everyone who does you can check t

he links below for our Instagram and social media and we'll see you next next [Music] week