How Filipino Food Became So Popular in Houston

In a city as diverse as Houston, it’s no surprise that a huge number of cultures are represented on the culinary scene: from Mexican street food to regional Vietnamese specialties, we have almost everything. However, at least one cuisine has remained underrepresented until recently: Filipino cuisine.

Isabel Protomartir, born in the Philippines and raised in Alief, grew up among families who prepared Filipino meals. “I think I was really lucky to have been surrounded by a lot of other Filipinos and food at the time,” Protomartir says. “Filipino food was specifically home.”

But there were only a few restaurants nearby that felt like a home away from home.

Now the co-founder of Have a Nice Day, a group that advocates for Asian American and Pacific Islander small businesses, she has seen a growing popularity of Filipino cuisine in Houston as restaurateurs, Chefs and bakers come together to help continue the spread of this unique cuisine. kitchen.

Tom Cunanan, menu consultant and partner chef of Soy Pinoy at the Post Houston with Paul Qui (another Filipino chef), believes many locals weren’t very familiar with the culture until recently and blames lack of education and visibility. Cunanan, who won the James Beard Award for Best Chef in the Mid-Atlantic for his former restaurant Bad Saint in D.C., says he came to Houston to do just that, educate people about its culture.

“Even 10 years ago, Filipino food was still a question mark for many non-Filipinos,” says Cunanan. “It’s all about spreading knowledge and doing research.”

Growing up as a Filipino American, Cunanan says he enjoyed a variety of authentic dishes through his mother’s cooking, especially on birthdays. Cunanan’s upcoming Hermies, a new upscale restaurant opening in Houston this summer that takes inspiration from the seafood markets of the Philippines, is a tribute to his mother, who died 10 years ago of cancer. When she was undergoing treatment, he made her write down all her recipes in a few Moleskine notebooks. Many of these same recipes will appear on the Hermies menu.

“She helped me find my true passion,” Cunanan says. “She guides me, whether she is there or not. Every time I cook her recipes, I think of her and feel like her spirit is near and telling me what to do.

Houston chef Andrew Musico, of pop-ups Fattest Cow and upcoming restaurant Chikahan, says he, too, grew up with Filipino food thanks to his mother. He later cooked and explored Filipino cuisine professionally under Qui as sous chef at the now-closed Aqui Restaurant. During the pandemic, he decided to delve deeper into cooking, but before he started preparing meals, Musico first did his research on the history.

The Philippines and its gastronomy are a mixture of different cultures due to colonization. Before becoming its own nation in 1946, the country and its people were ruled by Spain for over 300 years. After the Spanish-American War, the United States held possession until independence, with a period during World War II when the country was occupied by Japan.

This tumultuous past created the fusion that Musico grew up with with Spanish, indigenous and Chinese influences. Major Filipino dishes include lechón, or suckling pig; adobo, made from pork or chicken and often prepared with vinegar and soy sauce; kare-kare, a type of stew made with a thick peanut sauce; and lumpia, which are essentially fried spring rolls filled with a flavorful mixture of pork, cabbage and other vegetables.

What is even less known, Musico notes, is that Filipino cuisine has also been influenced by Muslim culture due to the large population presence on Mindanao, an island in the Philippines. For example, at one of its Fattest Cow pop-ups a few years ago, Musico served a curry dish called beef kulma.

“I always knew there were many influences in Filipino cuisine,” says Musico. “I think it was interesting to find (in my research) the more nuanced and smaller things that stood out.”

As for the recent popularity of Filipino cuisine, Cunanan believes that social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram should be thanked for the growing demand and knowledge. And while Protomartir says she can’t put her finger on one thing, she believes natural curiosity has played a role in the rise of Filipino cuisine, alongside chefs bringing the culture they grew up with to a wider audience.

Musico echoes this idea, adding that Houston’s food scene used to be a bit behind other big cities like Los Angeles or New York, but that has changed over the years as young people start to become leaders.

“I think what’s happened is we’ve had a whole generation of Filipinos who have entered the culinary scene and are now realizing the potential that we have to be as big as Vietnamese cuisine, Japanese cuisine or Thai cuisine,” explains Musico. “I think all of this is really just generational to a certain extent, and I think Houston is ready for that now.”

Another reason for the new emergence of Filipino cuisine dates back to the opening of Jollibee in the United States. The popular fast food chain in the Philippines, known for its fried chicken, burgers and pies, first came to Texas in 2013. The Houston area is now home to three locations.

“Jollibee is quintessential,” says Cunanan. “It’s like a Popeye’s in the Philippines. Now, with their expansion into the United States, they have taken control of the capacity market here.”

Jollibee’s flagship store on Main Street near NRG Stadium is in a strip occupied exclusively by Filipino businesses like Max’s Restaurant and Cherry Foodarama supermarket, Houston’s Little Manila. Florida-based The Baker’s Son became the newest addition by opening a location here in 2022. Ariosto Valerio, co-owner of Baker’s Son, says Jollibee has done wonders for the progressive growth of Filipino culture and its culinary offerings . He says chefs are finding more and more inspiration to cook and new Filipino restaurants are popping up everywhere.

In Houston alone, Be More Pacific opened in the Heights in 2020 after starting as a food truck in Austin 13 years ago, serving traditional dishes like adobe chicken, kare-kare and halo-halo for dessert. Filipiniana in the Braeburn area offers a buffet of Filipino classics. There are other Filipino chains, like Gerry’s Grill, and even a small Filipino cafe inside the Mission Bend HEB.

Like Cunanan, Valerio credits social media for the growth of Filipino representation among young people. The platforms could also be behind the growing popularity of ube, the purple yam that adds a pop of color to Filipino baked goods. Industry observers have crowned ube “Flavor of the Year 2024.”

Pop-up bakeries riding the ube wave include Salvaje and Ube Co. HTX, which offer mini cheesecake tartlets in a variety of flavors like ube and calamansi, a citrus fruit often found in Filipino cuisine, as well as such as ube tres leches, ube buko cups, an ube leche float, and many others.

Valerio says one of the goals of Baker’s Son is to continue to educate the community about ube. He says it’s much more than people think and to get an authentic flavor, it’s important to import the yam from the Philippines. Baker’s Son sells Filipino baked goods such as adobo pan del sal (meat-filled buns), pan de ube, and sapin-sapin, a sticky rice dessert covered in various flavorings. When Protomartir enters Baker’s Son, she says she feels a little closer to home.

“I love it,” she said. “I go there and honestly, it’s like an influx of memories.”

Valerio says he was drawn to Houston because of its diversity and the younger generation’s interest in cooking. Fans of the bakery will soon have the opportunity to enjoy a second location of Baker’s Son, set to open later this year at the Seafood City supermarket in Sugar Land, a chain that opened in December 2023 and s addressed to the Filipino and Asian communities.

Looking to the future, these chefs say they hope to one day see Filipino cuisine as mainstream as other cuisines widely enjoyed in Houston.

“Sometimes I get goosebumps when I think about it,” Valerio says. “We’ve had Chinese food, and now Indian and Greek food, but I think Filipino food is going to be available very soon. I think this is going to be important to our culture.