- 7 months ago
Exploring Southeast Asia's Most Unappreciated Cuisine
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00:00They say you've never feasted until you've feasted in the Philippines.
00:07Alright, I don't know if anybody actually says that, but they should.
00:11It's a lifetime memory, one of the real high points in the world of food.
00:17The Philippines is a country as in love with eating as anywhere on earth.
00:22A place where life revolves around family, friends, and absolutely epic meals.
00:29Yet somehow in the global culinary landscape, the food of the second largest country in all of Southeast Asia is ignored, insulted, and massively misunderstood.
00:40Even though for years it's been supposedly the next big thing.
00:44Today we're in Bangkok, Thailand, a city where cooks, servers, and managers from the Philippines work in some of the world's best restaurants.
00:53But where the food of their own country is hidden far outside the mainstream.
00:58So we're diving in, in search of the best of one of my favorite cuisines anywhere.
01:03Exploring the city's Pinoy subculture and bringing our appetite for a day of feasting like...
01:09Well, like we're in the Philippines.
01:11This is the Philippines.
01:12It's a country of 7,641 islands in the western Pacific Ocean, and we'll start with the natural resources.
01:26Before they spread everywhere, among the plants native to the Philippines are taro, ginger, turmeric, a dozen forms of citrus, and the coconut.
01:45Now, 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 making, and sugar cane as they seem to have had a sweet tooth.
02:06The Austronesians built the first permanent settlements, and genetically they still make up the majority of the population today.
02:15They were the famous seafarers who'd traded across the region, and by 2000 BC, they'd brought jackfruit from Java, bananas from New Guinea, pigs from China, and chickens from Thailand.
02:28As a side note, from the Philippines, many would continue on to explore much of the world, and settle islands far and wide.
02:35Today, their descendants are known to choose just a few examples, as the Malays, the Hawaiians, the Maori, and even the Malagasy of Madagascar.
02:46Anyway, their cuisine was based around rice, seafood, and a hundred uses of the coconut, especially fermented into vinegar and used for preservation, more on that later.
02:57Around 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.
03:08Then came the Spanish with their own dishes and techniques, and most significantly, their galleon trade route linking Manila to Mexico, making the Philippines the gateway to Asia for so many New World crops.
03:21Before gaining independence in 1946, the Philippines would be colonized, seized, or invaded by the Spanish, British, Americans, and Japanese, and all of them would leave their own marks on the food.
03:34And when you put it all together, you end up with something that doesn't really look like anything else on Earth.
03:41It's 10 o'clock in the morning at a restaurant called Kalamansi Cafe in Bangkok's Satorn District, a family-run business from two sisters from Cebu.
03:59It'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.
04:08And here? Well, this is about as authentic as it gets, and the perfect place for us to start our day.
04:15It's been four 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 my own.
04:34Anyway, four years is a long time, and it's long enough that I've already made an enormous mistake with this planned shoot.
04:42See, 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.
04:55But that's not how food works in the Philippines.
04:59Unless you're just looking for fried chicken or a plate of pancit and a San Miguel, to really appreciate the cuisine, you have to be prepared to feast.
05:10There's a term in Tagalog that describes the Filipino way of eating.
05:15It's a phrase called taranah, and it implies how you enjoy food when you're with friends or family.
05:21In English, taranah translates to, let's go.
05:26We hadn't even started eating, and already, the day was lost.
05:31I was at the mercy of taranah.
05:34You guys don't do things small in the Philippines.
05:42There is no such thing as like a light breakfast.
05:45This is a feast, and it's our first meal of the day.
05:48Well, in the Philippines, we go big. It's all about like, it's all about family, friends, and sharing and enjoying, especially with food.
05:55So there is no way you can make Filipino food like small, because then it loses the essence of what Filipino food is.
06:01Is there an order you would recommend? Should we go lighter to stronger? Is there something that we should have first, or do we just start eating?
06:15If you want to go with the quenilau, I mean, appetizer would be this one and quenilau, but honestly, Filipino food is fun.
06:23There's really not like a lot of like, you know, like order to it, so you go as it is.
06:28Like you would then eating, and like, you know, your fans, your family, you're enjoying, celebrating anything, celebrating life.
06:34You guys are going to join us for this, right? We can't do this alone. This is like, this is a lot for three of us.
06:45The reason we started the video with the geopolitical path of the Philippines is because here, every dish tells its own unique story.
06:54There's quenilau, found by archaeologists dating back to the original Austronesians, raw fish dressed with coconut or sugarcane vinegar and citrus.
07:05In 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.
07:16Until, of course, the Spanish brought citrus and this technique from the Philippines.
07:22That's not the only ancient dish on the table.
07:25There's dried and salted milk fish marinated for days in vinegar and seasonings before being deep fried, originally fishermen's food in coastal Luzon.
07:35Adobo began as an offshoot of quenilau, pork preserved in vinegar.
07:40Originally, it was salted, a technique that still exists, called white adobo.
07:46But this is where we start to see the influence of the foreigners.
07:50The Chinese brought soy sauce and the Spanish added garlic and the technique of searing the meat before braising.
07:56Today, adobo is considered perhaps the national dish, and here, it's served topped with more adobo, dried and shredded.
08:05Cari-cari comes from the years in the 1760s when the British occupied Manila.
08:10They brought Indian soldiers to help with the conquest, but a lot of those soldiers deserted, and eventually married into Filipino families.
08:18They'd make curries using local ingredients like peanuts, and over time, as they converted to Catholicism, oxtail became the protein of choice.
08:28Cari-cari, like a lot of Pinoy foods, is seasoned with bagung, or Filipino shrimp paste, which has its origins, of course, in Thailand, brought by traders around the year 1100.
08:41Bulak-lak uses pork intestine, favored by the Chinese, boiled, sautéed, and then deep fried in the style of Spanish chicharron, and topped with garlic and kaffir lime leaves.
08:53Sisig is a real trip across the millennia.
08:56It started as a salad made from New World ingredients like guava and papaya, prepared in the Austronesian way of using vinegar and citrus.
09:05But it didn't take on its modern form until as recently as the 1930s, when locals in Angeles City started making use of pig heads,
09:13discarded by American soldiers stationed at Clark Air Force Base.
09:18And Pinak Bet manages to combine everything, local seafood, vegetables from China, Europe, and Mexico, and shrimp paste from Thailand.
09:28You put it all 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,
09:37coming from a country of 110 million people with a massive overseas diaspora, has managed to stay such a secret.
09:47You know, there's been this thing forever in the culinary world, you know, I remember it was in the 90s, 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.
09:58You know, and actually assisting with the dish that he said was going to be the next dish that everybody knew about, right?
10:03Yeah. And it feels like going all the way back to the days after World War II when heavy waves of Filipino migration to the U.S. started.
10:12It's always been, every generation has predicted that Filipino food will make the mainstream.
10:21Yes.
10:22And 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.
10:32But what's your theory? Why is it that when you fly to Los Angeles or London or to any of the major international cities, you know, Filipino food is not as prominent or not as understood as so many other cuisines?
10:47Why is that?
10:49I think it's because like a lot of the Filipinos that fly into other cities, they're working.
10:55So it's like, we call it the overseas Filipino workers. And they're always intent on sending money home, bringing their family in.
11:04So that's really their main goal. So opening a restaurant is a risk. So mostly a lot of it is going to be like home cooking.
11:12In fact, we also have a lot of guests that say, oh, we should open up a restaurant in so-and-so in Australia,
11:17because I want to be able to bring my friends there. So I think it's just because the way the Filipino,
11:22the population of Filipinos are moving to different countries, it's just that it's more about home cooking or the very, very simple restaurants
11:31that might be a little bit too different or a little bit too like a foreign and might intimidate others.
11:37So if you see the ones that actually made it mainstream, I think in New York, they do, I think this guy, he does tacos.
11:44He makes it, he makes it more, he makes it more relatable, more American.
11:49But at the same time, you also lose the essence of what Filipino cuisine is.
11:53Because in a way, I mean, it's still Filipino ingredients, but it's in the shape of a, a taco or a burrito.
11:59So I think, and it's very hard to understand, understand cuisine when it's already like fusion-wise.
12:07So I think also Filipino food has a very bad rap globally. You know, I mean, even my, my friends here in Bangkok or, you know, overseas,
12:16they, they, they don't have a very positive image of like, you know, Filipino food. They think it's too oily.
12:23It'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.
12:31But actually, there's a, another side for the Filipino cuisine that actually we do want to highlight,
12:36which is the healthy stuff or the grilled dishes that, that we love or the steamed, you know.
12:41Do we consider this a healthy meal?
12:44Well, at least we have veggies. It's a balanced meal.
12:47This is, this is stupid how good this is. This is my new favorite Filipino dish. This is so good.
13:03Yeah, absolutely. This is insane how good this is.
13:08Now, I would love for this video to just continue on this path, eating some incredible cuisine, then going home happy.
13:21But the truth is there's an elephant in the room we have to bring up.
13:25And I'm not just talking about me after this meal.
13:29It's the fact that in spite of all of this, in spite of so much tradition and history and so many incredible dishes,
13:36Filipino food isn't really unknown so much as despised.
13:40And as unfair as that might be, well, we can't tell this story without confronting that subject.
13:48All right, in case you're not familiar with the global stereotypes of Filipino food, the short version is, it's pretty grim.
14:00According to general wisdom, it's the only place in Southeast Asia where the food sucks.
14:05The country with beautiful beaches, fast food and a bunch of deep fried bull .
14:10It's hard to rationalize what we just ate with the public perception.
14:14But it's pretty much understood that the Philippines are the black sheep of Southeast Asian cuisine.
14:19Now, there's a lot of reasons given, and I'll try to take on at least a few of them.
14:24All right, first, this is understandable.
14:26I mean, it was my own first impression arriving in Manila.
14:29It's not like Bangkok or Penang where all around you see the best of local foods just waiting to be explored.
14:35But this has more to do with culture than cuisine.
14:38There are good restaurants, don't get me wrong.
14:40But in general, the Philippines is a tight-knit place and meals are usually eaten at home.
14:45Restaurants are functional.
14:47Fast food and places called caranderias meant for the local working class to spend a few pesos on a cheap lunch.
14:53For the best stuff, you need to know somebody.
14:57All I see are burgers and fried chicken.
15:00Well, in tourist areas, that's pretty much true.
15:03But don't forget the Philippines were an American colony until the 1940s.
15:07Almost everywhere else, when visitors arrived, vendors and restaurant owners tried to find a way to appeal to the foreign palate.
15:14In the Philippines, they already knew how to do it.
15:17So you are served a bunch of inauthentic stuff when you're there, but it's because it's what you want, not what they eat.
15:24If Filipino food was any good, it wouldn't be so hard to find overseas.
15:28Again, it's true, it's not common in the US, and in the rest of the world, it's almost invisible.
15:34But again, there's a reason.
15:36Just a few weeks ago, we did a story on Burmese migrants and the path the food takes to the mainstream.
15:41When migrants arrive in a new country looking for a better life, a lot of the time there's not much work available.
15:47If they don't speak the language, they're pretty much limited to manual labor or maybe opening a small restaurant for the other migrants.
15:53Then over time and with enough visibility, the food might become accepted, then absorbed into the culture.
15:59That's the story of stuff like Chinese and Italian, to name two examples.
16:03But even though there are a lot of Filipino migrants, about 10 million in total,
16:08don't forget the national language is English.
16:11And there's always a high demand for English speakers willing to work on a migrant salary in fields like education,
16:17childcare, retail, and especially, ironically enough, restaurants.
16:22It's an open secret that high-end or foreign-focused F&B across Asia might collapse without Filipino staff,
16:29and I don't think that's an exaggeration.
16:31So the point is the food hasn't reached the global mainstream because overseas that first step in the process never happened.
16:38And number four.
16:40Well, this is a lot more complicated.
16:43In some ways it goes back to the home cooking culture,
16:46but there's a more complex reason why the best local dishes are not front and center.
16:51Let's go all the way back to the 1500s when the Spanish took control of the islands.
16:56It's easy today to talk about dishes they introduced,
16:59but at the time it wasn't an introduction so much as a forced assimilation.
17:04The Spanish referred to local cuisine as primitive and inferior.
17:08Local Filipinos in public settings were made to cook Spanish dishes,
17:12and old traditions survived only in family homes and private gatherings.
17:17Then the Americans arrived, and if anything, it got worse.
17:21There are writings from Helen Herron Taft, the future U.S. First Lady and at the time the wife of the American governor,
17:28who stated that the Filipinos were savages who must be made to learn proper cuisine.
17:33In fact, in those years, home economics was made compulsory for girls in Filipino schools
17:39so that they could learn how to cook food with a proper Western refinement,
17:42which, judging by what the Americans left behind, was hot dogs and spam.
17:48Anyway, for 400 years Filipino people were basically second-class citizens in their own country,
17:54and so they stuck together.
17:56Feasting on their own foods was a form of rebellion.
18:00And there was real rebellion, too.
18:02History is full of stories of local people rising up,
18:05fighting back and never losing their own proud identity.
18:09Hell, even Magellan was killed in the Philippines just 40 days after claiming the land for the Spanish.
18:15And the man who killed him, a warrior named Lapu-Lapu, would be honored in the most Filipino way possible.
18:21They named a fish after him, the grouper.
18:25Because I'm telling you, food is a serious business.
18:28So what all this means is that if you're in the Philippines,
18:31you might be right around the corner from really great food without ever actually knowing it.
18:36And that's the case overseas, too.
18:39In Bangkok, there's one neighborhood that's the country's only true Filipino enclave.
18:44It's called Preeti, officially Preeti Banam Yong,
18:48hugging the northern part of Sukhumvit 71 between Akamai and Prakanong.
18:53Now it doesn't look like a typical migrant cluster.
18:56There's not a lot of outward signs that you've arrived anywhere different from the rest of the city,
19:00but within a handful of alleys.
19:02It's where a large portion of the city's 30,000 Filipinos reside.
19:06Here there are supposedly a handful of restaurants,
19:09though I have no idea how to find them as most of them are unmarked and inside family homes.
19:15But there is one reason we came here, and that's because within Bangkok's Pinoy community,
19:21everyone knows that for the most authentic home-cooked stuff,
19:25you have to find the house of a woman named Delia and her husband Rami.
19:30To the untrained eye, it's almost invisible, an unassuming house along a winding alley off Preeti 26.
19:37But inside, it's actually the oldest Filipino restaurant still open in Thailand,
19:43making their dishes since 2003, so old school that we had to order a day in advance,
19:49not just so Delia could prepare the right ingredients,
19:52but because so many of the things she serves take hours to make,
19:56sometimes even starting the night before.
20:13What's the secret? Why do you stay open for so long? Why is it just good food?
20:19Actually, we cook just simple, simple cooking, just like normal.
20:24But God help us to cook this one, that's why the taste is good.
20:30Anyway, I don't have any secret, just simple cooking.
20:43This is a restaurant called New Mabuhay, and it wasn't always here.
20:59For a while, they operated on a busy street in Pratunam,
21:02but during COVID went back to their humble origins,
21:05cooking in a house for friends, neighbors, and those in the know.
21:13There's something special about eating in this way.
21:18Walking in through a cluttered front porch to find Delia in the back cooking,
21:23where, by the way, she's more than happy to share every single detail of her recipes.
21:27I mean, all you've got to do is ask.
21:29And then sitting down at a table with Rami and hearing his unique take on world politics,
21:34while surrounded by the incredible smells coming out of the kitchen.
21:38It's fun, and honestly, there's something about this way of eating
21:42that makes the food somehow taste even better.
21:46And this is just my theory.
21:48I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.
21:50In Thailand, 90% of the meals you eat, you take away or you eat out.
21:57People buy their cow gank, bring it home, you know?
21:59Yeah.
22:00Eat on the street, eat at restaurants.
22:02Restaurant culture.
22:03In my experience, I don't...
22:05You know the Philippines more than I do.
22:07I've only been up a couple of times.
22:09Yeah.
22:10But I've had some of the best meals of my life in the Philippines.
22:15But they're in somebody's house.
22:17They're at a party.
22:18They're at a social...
22:19Yeah.
22:20Everybody likes to have a party, get together.
22:21Exactly.
22:22Not restaurant culture.
22:23It's family culture.
22:24It's a little bit different.
22:25Right.
22:26I agree with that.
22:27I agree with that.
22:28I agree with that.
22:29100%.
22:30You are right.
22:31Mostly the Filipinos, they gather together for some anniversary or what.
22:36Anniversary.
22:37Not for food.
22:38The food is there just to add spices to the celebration.
22:42But Filipino people love to get together again.
22:45Yeah.
22:46Yes, exactly.
22:47I've had Filipino friends that have eaten in their homes before.
22:58So you?
22:59This is exactly...
23:00Exactly the same.
23:01Exactly the same.
23:02Exactly the same.
23:03Wow.
23:04Exactly the same.
23:05I've never had...
23:06Honestly, I've never had in a restaurant taste like this.
23:08Except in the Philippines.
23:09Mmm.
23:10But...
23:11And this is...
23:12This is the same.
23:13It's the same.
23:14It's exactly right.
23:15So tell me a little bit about your family's food.
23:18What would your mom cook when you were growing up?
23:20What were your memories of the food that you used to cook?
23:22Seven years, I know already how to cook.
23:24Because my mother loved to cook also.
23:26And then I just watching.
23:27Nobody...
23:28All your food is very ordinary.
23:30Yeah, ordinary.
23:31For 20 years, it's only dried fish and rice.
23:35Yeah, I love the dried fish.
23:36Tell the truth.
23:37Yeah, it's true.
23:38Because I'm from poor people.
23:39Dried fish and rice.
23:40That is the only menu.
23:41Yeah, my mother is only...
23:42My mother is only House Kapoor.
23:44And then my mom...
23:45My father is only a farmer.
23:48We are from poor people.
23:49That time I'm helping to...
23:52Like gardening.
23:53Yeah.
23:54You know the rice.
23:55Well, I know how to do it.
23:57Mmm.
23:58Because their menu is very simple.
24:00And then before...
24:01Even I go to school, I don't have any money to pay.
24:05So I just bring...
24:06You know the...
24:07Potato.
24:08I go to school, I bring two people to pour my lunch.
24:11The road cross.
24:12Really?
24:13Because I don't have like this.
24:14I do.
24:15We just eat the rice only lunch time.
24:17And then if we rice pelt, my father says stop to school for days.
24:22Why?
24:23I say no, just help your brother to making the rice pelt.
24:28Mm-hmm.
24:29So sometimes I cry.
24:30I go to teacher.
24:31Teacher, I'm so sorry.
24:32You cannot go to school for days because we just rice pelt.
24:35My teacher says okay, okay.
24:37Mm-hmm.
24:38But every year we have pay two pesos.
24:41But we don't have two pesos.
24:43I tell to my teacher what I'm going to do.
24:45My teacher say okay, I help.
24:46You wash my clothes and then I'm the one to pay.
24:48Mm-hmm.
24:49I do like that.
24:52Both Delia and Rami came from poor backgrounds and it was only through hard work and a lucky
24:57set of circumstances that brought them a better life.
25:00For Rami, the first in his family to finish secondary school, he worked his way into a
25:05career as an engineer, coming to Thailand to work on state-run projects in the 1990s.
25:11Delia learned the recipes of foods that for her family were too expensive, thanks to her
25:16older sister, who built her own successful career after leaving home.
25:21And sadly, this is the other reason why Filipino cuisine has never really broken through.
25:27For the people on the islands, life isn't always easy and few outsiders actually really
25:32explore the country, because to do so is to confront some of the most shocking poverty
25:37on the continent.
25:39It's not always safe in the cities to explore too far by foot, with some of Asia's highest
25:45crime rates, including a murder rate that just a few years ago reached about 9.5 out
25:49of 100,000, the same as Iraq.
25:52And while the per capita GDP is around $3,500 a year, already 124th in the world, over 40%
26:01of the population survives on less than $2 a day.
26:05You don't find the best local cuisine front and center when you land in the country because
26:09the country itself is just trying to survive.
26:13But of course, it's still the Philippines.
26:16Which means that even under the worst of circumstances, food is still a source of national pride.
26:22Well, pride and family arguments.
26:26Somebody watches this video, they've never experienced Filipino food before.
26:30What do you want them to know?
26:32What would you want them to know about the Philippines, to know about their food?
26:37Actually, you were right in the beginning that this kind of food is just evolutionary.
26:43We get it from other countries.
26:45But this one definitely comes from Japan.
26:48No.
26:49Then we derive that one.
26:51Not in Japan.
26:52Because you know, in my friends, we have a lot of fish.
26:55We just go and cut.
26:57We just put the onion.
26:58If you don't have money to buy some onion, we just put like this.
27:01We were conquered by Japanese, remember?
27:03Yeah, even me, I'm a small kid, we go to the Ana.
27:06In history, you don't forget that we were conquered by Japanese.
27:10They introduced this food to us.
27:18The neighborhood where New Mabuhay is located is in the heart of a Filipino community that
27:22officially numbers around 20,000, but unofficially might be at least twice that number.
27:29For anyone away from the Philippines for the first time, even with English language skills,
27:34adjusting can be difficult.
27:36I mean, as we've already covered, it's a unique place with a very independent culture.
27:41And walking around Preeti, when you know what you're looking for, you can start to
27:45see signs of what that experience might be like.
27:48On the ground floor of a nearby office building, there's Bangkok's only Filipino supermarket,
27:54Palenque, the Tagalog word for market.
27:57Here, they sell everything from canned meats to seasonings to pretty much whatever tastes
28:02like home.
28:06At Palenque, they sell frozen milk fish, sweet desserts, and the breads from their own bakery,
28:13stuff found across the Philippines and specifically from the city of Ilo Ilo.
28:18When we visited, the shelves were pretty much empty, and that's the nature of one shop servicing
28:23such a large migrant population.
28:25But a couple of days later, the manager was nice enough to send me a cell phone video of
28:30when their new stock arrived for the week, just before it would all be snapped up, as it always is.
28:37At this point, we were pretty much done.
28:48We'd been eating since we woke up, and there's only so much one can tarana in a single day.
28:54We'd planned to have our next meals in Pratunam, the home of two Filipino restaurants including Toto Inusal,
29:01which serves some of the best grilled chicken in a city full of amazing grilled chicken.
29:06But we figured our own survival would take priority, so we'd finish with just one more meal.
29:12This 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.
29:21So we loosened our belts and headed over to the gates of the Filipino Embassy for one final stop.
29:46So we had our gigantic, amazing, elegant Filipino feast to begin.
29:52We had our homestyle also feast second.
29:58And I'm finishing today the way that, you know, what would be a classic meal if you were just working in Manila or Cebu or anywhere else in the Philippines.
30:13And that would be a plate of noodles and a beer.
30:27I think one thing that hopefully you've seen today, you know, sometimes it's frustrating when there's a dish like Tom Yum, like we did in our last video.
30:36I can generally assume that you watching have some reference point to the flavor.
30:44You know, you can see what we're eating and you can have some general idea what it tastes like.
30:50Because, you know, most people know Tom Yum, right? It's just a dish that's going global.
30:54And 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.
31:06And you don't have a reference point. I mean, I didn't have a reference point.
31:09If I just saw this before 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.
31:19Right. 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.
31:25And and if there's one thing I wish I was better at, it's that I wish there was a vocabulary that I knew.
31:31You 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.
31:40And I think Filipino food has its own completely unique, you know, it's not mild, but it's not overpowering in any one direction.
31:52You know, that's the interesting thing about Filipino food is it's its own flavor profile.
31:56You can taste something 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.
32:07You know, the emphasis 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.
32:15And I love that about it. 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 Asian countries.
32:27The center of global trade that it has been for so long that it still has its very unique characteristics and flavor profiles and preferences and textures and tastes and dishes that nobody else has.
32:43And yeah, you know, you can't ignore Filipino food when you talk about the great cuisines of Southeast Asia, that is for sure.
32:53And 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 Adam.
33:07Because today we have only been to two restaurants before this, and I am as stuffed as I have ever been on this channel.
33:15But guess what, for you, still eating.
33:27And I ordered, I ordered dessert too, because there's no Filipino video without Halo Halo.
33:40I'm shocked that all I've eaten today, I have no trouble eating this. It's actually pretty, it's actually pretty good.
33:54I got a bean, I got a, what appears to be a red kidney bean.
34:02Got some corn.
34:07I mean, it's a salad.
34:10A.
34:12You can.
34:13It's a salad.
34:14This is a salad.
34:15This is a salad.
34:16It's an estate.
34:17This is a salad.
34:18I want to.
34:20Let me go.
34:25I can.
34:26I can.
34:27It's a salad.
34:28I'm.
34:29It took me.
34:30It took me.
34:31It took me to a salad.
34:32This is an Eggplant.
34:33It was only two.
34:34It was a salad.
34:35This is an salad.
34:36It's an salad.
34:37It was important.
34:38It's a salad.
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