Filipinos often say food is our love language. It’s an easy default, a way to explain why our parties always start in the kitchen, why our parents and grandparents showed affection through second helpings or a cupboard full of snacks, and why some of our best conversations happen around a bowl of sinigang/tinola/bulalo/arroz caldo.
I’m guilty of saying it a lot, too, but I’ve been thinking: maybe Filipino food isn’t just about love. Maybe it’s something more powerful.
Filipino food is our collective memory. Served family-style, wrapped in banana leaves, and simmered in gata, it’s history and identity you can taste. Filipino food is migration, resilience, and reinvention. It’s the unwritten adobo recipe that passes from one generation to another, evolving slightly with every hand that makes it.
Name your favorite Filipino food or restaurant
This month, on the Modern Minorities podcast, I put up the Halo-Halo signal and asked friends across the diaspora to name one Filipino dish or restaurant they love.
In typical Filipino fashion, most answered both:
🥩 Lydia Querian: Oxtail Adobo – Broke Da Mouth, HI
🐖 Brian Velasquez Reid: Lechon Liempo – Naks, NYC
🍄 Geraldine Mae Cueva: Mushroom Sisig – Lasita, LA
🍳 Susie Quesada: Silog Plates – Alda’s Kitchen, CA
🍜 Aebbey de Gracia: Pancit Palabok – Ruby’s Fast Food, Chicago
While the dishes were different, the commonality that connected everyone’s choices was memory. For Filipinos living in the diaspora, food isn’t just food. It’s comfort, family, and belonging. Ron Dizon of Teofilo Coffee in Long Beach shared a quiet moment of childhood spent eating a bowl of rice, salted and mixed with goat milk and mango that his Lola made for him. Michael Wong of Asian Verified went in the opposite direction—staking his claim for adobo fried rice made from the remnants of adobo and rice from dinner the night before.
Filipino food is a gateway—and we’re all walking through it
Raman Sehgal has been hosting Modern Minorities for 4 years now. And he spent some time asking me some questions about Filipino food. One of the questions he asked was, “Who would you take to a Filipino restaurant?”
I didn’t hesitate: I’d like to take the most racist person in Congress to a Filipino restaurant.
One dinner isn’t going to eradicate a person’s internalized racism, though I think, given time, I might be successful. I’m not inviting them for the optics or the clout—I simply believe that food, shared with intention, opens doors. It creates room. It makes someone stop and consider the story behind the dish, the person who prepared it, and how it was served.
Filipino food is finally having its moment. You can find ube everywhere. Filipino chefs are getting mainstream recognition in culinary circles (Kasama’s Michelin star, James Beard awards for Abi Balingit and Kuya Lord).
And with this visibility comes something much deeper: a reckoning.
As our food becomes familiar to non-Filipinos, many Filipino Americans are still in the process of learning to truly know it ourselves. For many of us, it wasn’t too long ago that the wonderfully pungent fragrance of onion, garlic, and bagoong were a source of shame and insecurity. For some folks like me, our parents came to the U.S. not knowing how to cook. So they learned, but the range of our knowledge of Filipino food was limited to what our parents could cook, and/or they were limited to dishes that were specific to the regions from whence they came.
We’re trying to reclaim recipes and ingredients that were lost on the voyage over. I don’t think my mom and her friends ever made sinigang without a Knorr tamarind soup base packet. Part of the reason was there was no tamarind in the small West Virginia town I grew up in. But it didn’t matter. The shortcut was the recipe.
I live in New York, and although I have access to sour tamarind, I make sinigang for my kids the same way—with shortcuts, tomato, garlic, and pride.
After all food is continuity. It’s constancy. And it’s resistance.
And across the diaspora, more of us are continuing the story—on our own terms.
On the Modern Minorities podcast, I spoke with two women who are shaping the next chapter of Filipino food:
🎙️ Susie Quesada, President of Ramar Foods
As the third-generation president of the largest Filipino food manufacturer in the U.S., Susie is continuing a legacy that began with her grandmother’s dream. She grew up around lumpia lines and freezer aisles—and now leads the company with vulnerability, pride, and purpose.
“You create trust when you bring your whole self.”
🎙️ Nicole Ponseca, author of I Am a Filipino
Nicole left advertising to launch Maharlika and Jeepney in NYC—serving bold, kamayan-style dinners that declared our presence and our pride.
“Our faces and our stories weren’t included. That was my bat signal to make that change.”
Their stories reminded me that Filipino food isn’t just trending, it’s reclaiming its seat at the table. And so are we.
As non-Filipino diners discover our flavors, Filipinos are simultaneously (re)discovering the regional and indigenous dishes our parents didn’t know, didn’t cook, or simply didn’t pass on.
We’re reclaiming our palate. And with it, our stories.
Halo-halo isn’t just dessert. It’s our mixed, layered, imperfect, and joyful history.
Dinuguan isn’t weird. It’s a testament to our resilience and our legacy of nose-to-tail cooking born from scarcity and brilliance.
Spam isn’t shameful. It’s a salty reminder of how we made do and made magic from the scraps to sustain ourselves.
The revolution won’t be televised.
It will be eaten.
So what now?
Try the dish you never grew up with.
Call your mom. Text your cousin.
Go to the restaurant your Lola would’ve loved.
Or better yet, cook for someone, and tell them the story behind it.
🎧 Listen to my Filipino Food Month podcast on Modern Minorities → 🎧 Listen to Susie & Nicole’s full conversations →
🛒 Craving something nostalgic and chewy? Try our Filipino-inspired gummies →
100 Ways to Filipino is a growing collection of stories, moments, and cultural breadcrumbs exploring identity, memory, and the ways we show up, especially when we’re raised far from the motherland.
Share this with your Tita, your foodie friend, or someone who thinks Filipino food stops at lumpia. We’ve got 99 more ways to go. 🇵🇭✨