Where to go for authentic Filipino food in Hong Kong
It may not be as celebrated as other Asian cuisines, but Filipino fare has a great diversity of flavours
The Philippines is home to a proud and varied cuisine that draws on the culinary traditions of old trading partners and colonisers, from Chinese to Spanish, along with homespun fare. It encompasses rich regional specialities, a flourishing street food culture and labour-intensive dishes of great sophistication and skill.
On paper, then, Filipino food seems like a contender for the next trendy cuisine. But outside the Philippines, the food is often seen as heavy and overly reliant on fried meats, sticky sweet sauces and vinegar. And any mention of the cuisine to so-called foodies elicits swift dismissal when there is little reason for disdain.
Filipino food has a long history of fantastic home-cooked dishes, even though the Philippines has a less revered culinary tradition than, say, China.
Other cultural influences aside, Filipino fare reflects the natural bounty present in the islands. Seafood is fresh and plentiful, as are tropical fruits and local vegetables such as taro. The tropical climate has led to a wide range of food preservation techniques and a love of sour, pickled, bitter and sweet flavours; local styles of vinegar, often made from coconut, can be addictive.
If you want to give the food of the Philippines a chance, Hong Kong is home to myriad restaurants, from roadside venues to family-friendly joints, that give the more than 140,000 Filipinos living here a taste of home.
Certain favourites are understandably difficult for non-Filipino palates to swallow - balut, a fertilised duck embryo, for example. But other dishes seem impossible to fault: there's longaniza, a sweet, spicy, and garlicky local sausage; bagnet, or crispy fried pieces of pork served with a tart vinegar sauce; and sisig, a flavourful mix of pig head meat and offal, served sizzling with a squeeze of lime and hot sauce. Then, of course, there are the crowd-pleasers that even the snootiest diners can admit a fondness for: lechon, stuffed and spit-roasted whole pig with crispy skin, and crispy pata, a slow cooked and deep-fried pork knuckle.