Since October 2020, Keanu Francisco has been running a once-a-month pop-up restaurant at Sara, a dining establishment in Toronto, where the Canadian Filipino works as a chef.
This Toronto restaurant doesn’t have the logo that is easily recognizable to many Filipinos.
It’s the image of a banga (clay pot) cooking over flames shaped like the letters B and F. B and F stand for Barrio Fiesta, a dining institution in the Philippines.
I stand at the sidewalk of a tree-lined street in Victoria, British Columbia, looking up at an old wood frame house, wondering how to find the person I had come to see as I had left my cell phone at home and so could not call. A young girl, Caucasian, comes down the front steps with a bound, and I ask: “Excuse me, is there a Filipino family living in this house?” She tells me to go up a path to the left of the house and knock on the first door.
In a February 2020 post, Big 7 Travel, a popular international travel website, listed what it considers to be the best Filipino restaurants in Canada.
A total of 25 establishments made it to the site’s enumeration.
Colin Asuncion’s foray into amateur (and eventually competitive) baking is inspired by his mom Elizabeth’s mastery in the kitchen.
In the Town of Minto, Ontario (population under 9,000) lies an unassuming restaurant that offers pandesal specials: pandesal bruschetta, pulled pork slider, pandesal garlic toast and pandesal BLT. Among its breakfast and lunch staples is also a particularly Filipino dish – crispy adobo rice bowl.
Pancit canton, or wheat noodles stir fried with a medley of meats, seafood, and vegetables, is a popular dish in the Philippines.
It is such an integral part of Filipino cuisine that many restaurateurs outside the country have incorporated the fare in their menus.
In the heart of downtown Vancouver is a quaint café serving food with a big Filipino heart. Called Herbs and Spices Café, the restaurant describes itself as “the daily real-life adventures of women who support each other through thick and thin.”
Kamayan, or eating with your hands while food is spread on banana leaves, has become increasingly popular in Filipino restaurants around the Greater Vancouver area.
Ask a Filipino what food on a stick means to him. Surely not kebabs but rather pork barbecue, banana-cue, kamote-cue, almost anything grilled like pusit (dried squid), hotdogs and even corn on the cob. Whether sweet like karyoka (sticky rice balls) or savoury like kwekwek (quail eggs in batter), the list of Filipino street food on a stick is endless.
A documentary on the rise of the Filipino cuisine in North America has been making the rounds of film festivals and selling out tickets in theatres. On February 24, the movie ULAM: Main Dish will be shown at the Park Theatre in Winnipeg. This will be the fourth Canadian theatrical release to date.
In 1992, Liza Agbanlog and her family arrived in Canada bringing with them a whole lot of Filipino food memories.