Pinoy joy: Filipino food makes its way in Canada

“When I started making Filipino food decades ago, there wasn’t really anyone to look up to as a visible Filipino chef,” says Robbie Hojilla. He’s a key player in the continuously evolving Filipino food scene across Canada and in charge at BBs, the colourful Toronto diner-into-dinner and Bib Gourmand recipient.

In restaurants, popups, home-based catering, and community groups like Tulaymeansbridge in Toronto, a cooperative where Filipino-Canadian chefs cook for and learn from each other, there’s a determined embrace of Pinoy cuisine afoot.

“Our cuisine has myriad influences and nuances,” says Joie Alvaro Kent, a Vancouver-based food writer who has long been advocating for Filipino cuisine. “It merits recognition without needing to be legitimised in the context of another culinary tradition.”

_{Robbie Hojilla}

Almost a million people in Canada have their origins in the Philippines, the country’s third-largest source country for immigrants. The bright, sour, salty, sweet (and sometimes funky) food of the 7461-island archipelago is gaining recognition in Canada’s culinary vocabulary. Proud Pinoy chefs’ modern takes on traditional dishes are turning more than a few heads, with Bib Gourmand recognition informing an increasing popularity.

Chef Hojilla’s own commitment is to make the flavours true. “Take Filipino spaghetti, where the classic is one note: very sweet,” he explains. “I turn down the sweetness, add some vinegar to punch it up, and some butter. When people who are familiar with it try my version, there’s a nuance they can’t quite put their finger on.”

“Filipinos love contrasting flavours,” says Danny Cancino, chef and co-owner at Mineral, a mostly tasting-menu restaurant in Toronto’s tony Rosedale neighbourhood. “We like the sour, the salty, and the flavours of preservation. My theory is that our palate is historically defined through preserving foods with vinegars and citruses.”

_{Mineral. Photo by Angel Leung}

Vancouver’s Jamaican-Filipino Top Chef finalist Andrea Alridge, most recently head chef at the city’s Italian restaurant Savio Volpe, never leaves Filipino vinegar far behind. She’s enthusiastic about the use of coconut vinegar to enhance her Italian braises and ragùs. “Coconut vinegar really opens up your palate with different levels and layers, and rounds out flavours with an extra punch,” she says. “It’s smoother than super tart apple cider vinegar.”

Back in Toronto, Mineral’s Cancino transforms Canadian ingredients into Filipino dishes with his Baffin Island turbot sinigang, a sour stew famous for the use of tamarind, guava, green mango or green tomato as a souring agent. Cancino uses Québec sea buckthorn to create the pucker. “We’re trying to pretend that Toronto is the 7462nd island,” he says. “When guests hear about the dish’s origins and how we do it, it romanticises the food.”

Cancino’s 12- to 14-course tasting menus are carefully constructed experiences, telling the story of the kind of Filipino family party that the family lola and titas take days to prepare. Kicking off with light and fresh merienda dishes like citrus-marinated tuna kinilaw and sweet-tart kombu with pineapple, the menu moves on to pulutan, snack and drink-friendly bites. Cancino reimagines fresh spring roll lumpia as scallop-filled inari, Japanese-style marinated tofu pouches, harkening to Japan’s influences on Filipino food. In-house fermented Ontario blue plums are used as a marinade for barbecue chicken inasal, giving a special Canadian zing to the dish. Ulam, big mains served with rice, might be duck adobo or that tart sinigang. Matamis, the sweets course, ends the evening, featuring mauve-hued leche flan, made from the quintessential dessert flavouring of the Philippines, ube.

_Buboy

Vancouver’s Alden Ong is head chef at Farmer’s Apprentice, a Bib Gourmand restaurant in laid-back Kitsilano. Ong’s influences are Filipino-Chinese – with some Texas barbecue on the side. His menus, including his summer-only Basta Barbecue lunchtime menu, showcase Filipino regional cuisine. “I have to use local ingredients,” Ong says. “That’s a challenge, but also liberating. It creates a new point of view for each dish.”

Ong’s Pyanggang chicken, with Tausug-style burnt coconut, is an example: a barbecue dish that gets transformed into a vegan cauliflower main at dinnertime. He also puts a twist on the Pampanga rice tamale, boboto, making an in-house rice flour of soaked jasmine and sushi rice, smoked maitake, annatto and squash. Ong has been playing with nixtamalized corn over the years; working this way with rice is a natural segue for him.

Making everything from scratch is also at the root of Eric Lazaro’s Buboy in Montreal’s west end. On any given day, the classically trained Lazaro is simmering a day’s-long bone broth – the basis of his special bulalo, a collagen-rich beef noodle and corn soup – fermenting fruit vinegars, making longanisa sausages with meat from nearby Atwater Market, where his suki, or long-standing vendor, has been serving him for years, or preparing sweet, cured pork-neck tocino in his tiny kitchen. Lazaro has a reputation for his hearty silog breakfasts, the meaty options laid on a bed of soft garlic rice topped with a perfectly fried egg.

_{Mygem T. Bernabe and a dish at Junior Filipino}

Across town at Junior Filipino in Montreal’s Little Burgundy, co-owner and chef Lorenzo Aquino is getting ready for a pop-up with a visiting chef from Siargo Island in the southern Philippines. The face of Junior, co-owner DJ Jojo Flores, has ambitions for the bistro and spreading the gospel of Filipino food across the city. Along with Aquino and other co-owners, they’re planning the opening of a fine-dining spot called JunJun next door, and a downtown street-food-focused outpost of Flores’ vinyl café, Café GotSoul.

As with other Filipino restaurants across the country, Junior Filipino’s clientele is mixed: young, old, Filipino and non-Filipino. “Anthony Bourdain preached that he loved pork sisig, so a lot of people want to try that here,” Aquino says. “Our other popular dish is our Bicol Express, with a base of bagoong shrimp paste, sambal chilli, and coconut milk. That might be a more familiar flavour because it’s more in a Thai curry style.”

“The hardest thing about unpacking Filipino food is that it’s super regional, and there’s nothing completely traditional about it,” says Mineral’s Cancino, citing adobo, a dish that can feature proteins like chicken, pork, seafood or fish with bay leaves, black pepper, soy sauce and vinegar… or not.

_{Tuna kinilaw at BBs}

“There are regions in the Philippines that don’t use soy sauce; they might only use patis – fish sauce – or just salt. Some use turmeric because of a spice route influence, like the southern Philippines’ adobong dilaw, yellow adobo. A white adobo, adobong puti, is more from regions which use coconut milk. In Bicol, where they use lots of chillies, there’s adobong sa gata, with chillies and coconut. There’s even red adobo, adobong pula, in the north, which uses the saffron, paprika, and annatto brought by the Spanish. So even if you’re just talking about this one dish, it can be so different everywhere.”

And that difference is delicious, especially when there’s a secret ingredient involved. Chef Mygem T. Bernabe, Sous Chef at Gibson’s on British Columbia’s remote Sunshine Coast, uses patis to enhance her adobo-stuffed Filipino empanadas. “Patis holds its own in that kind of dish,” she says. “It’s not too salty, it’s not too sweet, and it gives the food a really Filipino taste which people can’t always identify.” The entrepreneurial Bernabe is taking advantage of the restaurant’s impending closure to open a food truck specialising in precisely that dish.

While European techniques might have informed these chefs in their early training, the strong, savoury, tangy flavour memories of family food and life in the Philippines are the guiding stars for all.

“I’ve definitely gotten less Eurocentric as I’ve gotten older,” BBs' Hojilla affirms. “It’s less fusion now, and more like ‘Here’s a Filipino dish – with some French techniques.’”