What Is Filipino Food? A First-Timer's Guide
What Filipino food actually tastes like, where the flavours came from, the dishes to start with, and how to order on your first visit in Halifax.
Barrios Restaurant & Bar
9/27/20266 min read
What Is Filipino Food? A First-Timer's Guide in Halifax
Filipino food is the cooking of the Philippines, and the shortest honest description is this: it leans sour and salty where its neighbours lean spicy or sweet, and almost all of it is built to be eaten with rice.
If you have had Thai or Vietnamese food in Halifax and are wondering how this is different, that is the answer. Filipino cooking is not usually chili-hot, and it does not arrive with a pile of fresh herbs on the side. What it does instead is play sour against salty, usually with vinegar, and let fat and garlic carry the rest.
Some of you grew up on this food and are just looking for where to get it. Some of you are starting today. This page is for both.
What Filipino food tastes like
Salt comes from soy sauce, from patis, which is fish sauce, and from bagoong, a paste of fermented shrimp or fish. Sour comes from vinegar, from tamarind, or from calamansi, a small green citrus somewhere between a lime and a mandarin. Sweet shows up in marinades, in barbecue and in the desserts.
Sinigang is the dish that proves the point. It is a sour soup, usually soured with tamarind, with pork or fish and vegetables in it, and Filipinos will argue about it as readily as they argue about adobo. If the sour-and-salty idea sounds strange on paper, one bowl of sinigang explains it faster than any paragraph can.
Heat is the thing people get wrong. Most Filipino dishes are not spicy. Bicol is the region that leans hardest on chili, usually with coconut milk, and laing is the dish to look for there. Coconut milk itself is used all over the country, so it is the chili, not the gata, that makes Bicol food Bicol food. And anywhere in the Philippines you can add your own heat from the sawsawan.
Sawsawan is the dipping sauce on the table: vinegar with garlic and chili, soy with calamansi, sometimes bagoong. That is not garnish. It is how you season your own plate.
Filipino food influences: Chinese, Spanish, Mexican and American
You can taste the history.
Chinese traders brought noodles and wrappers, centuries before any European arrived. Pancit, lumpia and siomai all carry Hokkien names. Pancit is the noodle dish, and there are dozens of versions; the one you will meet first is usually pancit bihon, thin rice noodles stir-fried with vegetables and a little meat.
Spain ruled from 1565 to 1898, and that is where caldereta, menudo, mechado and leche flan come from. They are Filipino dishes in Spanish clothing rather than transplanted Spanish ones: Filipino menudo, with pork, liver, potato and tomato, is nothing like the Mexican dish of the same name.
Mexico belongs in this story more than most menus admit. Spanish rule ran through Acapulco and the galleon trade, which is how tomatoes, chilies, corn and achuete reached the islands. Half the Spanish-sounding dishes depend on ingredients that came the long way round, across the Pacific.
The American period brought canned goods, fried chicken and a sweet tooth. Filipino spaghetti, sweet and studded with hot dogs, came later still, out of banana ketchup, which Maria Orosa developed during a wartime tomato shortage.
Two things that frame does not cover. Spanish control never really reached Mindanao and Sulu in the south, and the food there is its own cuisine: no pork, dishes like tiyula itum and piaparan, and satti for breakfast. And halo-halo, the shaved-ice dessert, came from Japanese kakigori shops in the Philippines before the war.
Underneath all of it sits the local foundation: rice, seafood, coconut, vinegar and garlic, and vinegar-preserving that predates every one of those arrivals.
Popular Filipino dishes to try first
Adobo is the dish most people name first. Meat braised in vinegar, garlic, bay leaf and black pepper, with soy sauce in most versions, though adobong puti skips the soy and lets the vinegar stand alone. The technique is older than the Spanish word for it. Every family makes it differently and every family thinks theirs is right. It is not on our regular menu, but it is part of our Sunday brunch rotation, so it turns up on some Sundays. It is never guaranteed on a given Sunday.
Pork barbecue skewers are the easiest way in. Sweet, savoury and smoky, off the grill.
Lumpia is a category rather than a single dish. Ours are lumpiang shanghai, the thin fried kind with ground pork inside. Lumpiang sariwa is the other one, soft and unfried, with a peanut and garlic sauce. Order the fried ones for the table. They go first.
Sisig is chopped pork with crisp edges, served sizzling on a cast-iron plate. Ours is roasted pork seasoned with soy sauce and chili, with an egg cracked on top and steamed rice alongside. Traditionally it is made from pig's head and ears, often with liver. The sizzling plate is a 1970s invention from Angeles City in Pampanga. The word itself is older, and in an eighteenth-century Kapampangan dictionary it meant to snack on something sour, which is where the sourness in the dish comes from. Pampanga and Iloilo will each tell you they are the country's culinary capital. Iloilo has the UNESCO listing. Pampanga has sisig.
Kare-kare is a thick, mild, savoury stew in a golden peanut sauce. Traditionally the meat is oxtail. Ours is the lechon kawali version, made with crispy pork belly, with bokchoy, eggplant and green beans, and it comes with rice and with the bagoong on the side, so you salt it yourself. Peanut sauce and shrimp paste mean two major allergens on one plate.
Crispy pata is a pork hock, simmered in spices until it falls off the bone and then deep-fried until the skin shatters. Ours comes with a soy vinegar dipping sauce. It is a whole-table dish, so bring people.
For dessert, halo-halo is shaved ice layered with evaporated milk, sweet beans, fruit, leche flan and ube, a purple yam. At Barrios it is an occasional special the chef puts on, not a menu item, so ask if it is on. Leche flan on its own is made with egg yolks and condensed milk and steamed rather than baked, which is why it is so dense.
What surprises first-timers
Rice is not a side. Many dishes are seasoned to be eaten with plain rice and taste too strong on their own. That is the design, not a mistake.
The cutlery is a spoon and fork, not a knife and fork. The fork pushes, the spoon does the eating.
Food goes in the middle of the table and arrives as it is ready rather than in courses.
And there is more than three meals. Merienda is the snack between them, usually mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and a lot of the best Filipino food lives there.
Sunday is its own thing. Filipino brunch runs 10:30 AM to 4 PM and it is a spread rather than a menu: tocino and longganisa, pandesal, siomai, bacon and eggs, hash browns, a soup that changes every week, Filipino lunch mains, dessert, and bottomless sago gulaman. Twenty-nine dollars for adults and fifteen for children.
How to order on your first visit
One dish you recognize, one you do not. That is the whole strategy.
For two people, a plate of lumpia, one rice bowl and one stew is plenty. For four, add a pancit in the middle of the table and one big shared dish like crispy pata. Tell your server it is your first time and let them steer you. It is a better system than guessing.
If you do not eat pork, say so early, because a lot of the menu is pork. Chicken inasal, the noodles ordered with chicken or shrimp, the haddock and the vegetable dishes will get you a full meal. If you are vegetarian, the pinakbet is the one to know about: squash, beans, okra, eggplant and crispy tofu, and our menu lists it as vegetarian and vegan-friendly. Say so before you order rather than after, because fish sauce and shrimp paste turn up in places that look meat-free.
Quick answers
What does Filipino food taste like?
Sour and salty more than spicy, with garlic and vinegar doing most of the work, and rice underneath almost everything.
Is Filipino food spicy?
Usually not. Bicol cooking, which uses coconut milk with a lot of chili, is the main exception, and you can always add heat yourself from the vinegar on the table.
What is the national dish of the Philippines?
Adobo is the usual answer, with sinigang close behind. Neither is official, and people will argue about it happily.
What should I try first?
Pork barbecue skewers or lumpia to start. Sisig when you are ready for something bolder, and kare-kare if you want a full plate with rice under it.
What is sawsawan?
The dipping sauces on the table, usually vinegar with garlic and chili or soy with calamansi. You use them to season your own plate.
What is ube?
A purple yam, used in desserts. It is sweet, mild and slightly nutty, and it is what makes halo-halo purple.
Is everything pork?
A lot of it is, but not all. Chicken inasal, the noodles with chicken or shrimp, the haddock and the vegetable dishes are all pork-free, and the pinakbet is listed as vegetarian and vegan-friendly. Tell us when you order.
Where can I try Filipino food in Halifax?
Barrios Kitchen & Bar, 1571 Barrington Street in downtown Halifax. Open Tuesday to Saturday from 11:30 AM, until 9 PM Tuesday to Thursday and 11 PM Friday and Saturday. Closed Mondays. Filipino brunch on Sundays, 10:30 AM to 4 PM. Call 902-444-2515 or book a table.