Filipino Food Week Is Back in Hawaii This Oct 15-21, Support Participating Restaurants

Social media just might be the missing ingredient that will finally bring Filipino cuisine to the next level and raise it to the stature it deserves. 

Filipino food is everywhere on social media from Meta and Instagram to Tiktok.  Besides in the Philippines, Filipino food bloggers and influencers are writing reviews on Filipino restaurants in London, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Las Vegas, Houston, Honolulu, and other cities where a Filipino community exists.

On YouTube, Filipino food recipes from the classic national dishes like pork or chicken adobo to regional specialties like chicken inasal and sinigang are available and receive loads of views and likes. It’s common for non-Filipinos to seek these and other recipes of Filipino dishes they enjoyed at a Filipino friend’s party or restaurant. Tiktok shorts of Filipino food are frequently shared and appear on news feeds.

Even food trends like the kamayan are catching on and emerging not just at Filipino restaurants but experimented at both Filipino and non-Filipino parties in the U.S. and elsewhere. Kamayan is a unique dining experience in which a variety of dishes are laid out on a long table atop banana leaves for a fun way of shared consumption. Invitees to a kamayan party will eat using their hands, an ancient way of eating that was practiced in the Philippines.

People have been posting Filipino silog breakfast – garlic rice, runny egg and various proteins from longganisa to tocino – that they make on a weekend. They’re posting Filipino food they get from restaurants in NYC and Seattle, food trucks in North Carolina and Virginia or food pop-ups in Los Angeles and Orange Country.

Ube, a purple yam originally from the Philippines that’s often boiled and then mashed with condensed milk, is all the buzz now. Posters are sharing ube ice cream, ube ensaymada, ube macaroons, ube halo-halo, ube croissants, ube made in traditional and creative non-traditional ways.  

Ube has been a staple in Filipino-cuisine used in cakes and ice cream that only recently became a mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. Foodies say one of the first to introduce ube in the U.S. in 2016 was the Manila Social Club in New York that made ube doughnuts. Ube has become so popular that it’s used not only in Filipino bakeries and restaurants but incorporated in mainstream bakeries and coffeeshops. Still, it is recognized as a product from the Philippines which helps to promote not just ube but other Filipino food and ingredients.

Filipino restaurant owners are promoting their business on social media. In the past, it was common to just have a website. But Filipino restaurant owners are posting and sharing their specials, menu items, event promotions. It’s the kind of marketing that Filipino cuisine needed to make up for the lack of Filipino restaurants in the U.S. in the past decades.

As Filipino cuisine exposure increases, hopefully it will spur a demand wherein Filipino restauranteurs can meet that increased demand in the future.

6th Filipino Food Week (FFW)
Helping to promote Filipino cuisine in Hawaii has been the Philippine Consulate General in Honolulu’s Filipino Food Week. This October 15-21, the Consulate is bringing FFW back for its 6th iteration. Participating restaurants and chefs in Hawaii will feature delicious culinary offerings of the “Ilonggo Cuisine” – this year’s theme. 

Ilonggo cuisine comes from the Visayas region of the Philippines. This year’s FFW offering will be a unique experience for even the local Hawaii Filipino community who mostly have their roots from the Ilocos and Tagalog regions of the Philippines. 

Once again, we are encouraging our local Filipino community to come out and support FFW and the wonderful participating restaurants helping to promote our cuisine. Make it a date night out or friends’ reunion or family outing. It’s a week-long event spread across various parts of Oahu and the neighbor islands so it will be convenient to choose one day in a week at a restaurant near your neighborhood.

Filipino cuisine plays a big part in the creation of the Hawaii Regional Cuisine. Filipino food is already popular at Hawaii household parties as fixtures like lumpia and pancit are commonly served in a buffet line. But relative to the abundance of restaurants representing other ethnic groups in Hawaii, Filipino cuisine is still underrepresented. 

Comparatively, Filipino restaurants are taking off in Las Vegas, Nevada and cities across California. We hope the same popularity will finally take root on the Hawaiian Islands. As one aspect of our culture, it’s a matter of ethnic and community pride that Filipino cuisine rise in stature locally. There are far more dishes than the popular lumpia, pancit and adobo that still can be discovered by our local community. 

It was a smart decision by the Philippine Consulate in Honolulu to choose Ilonggo Cuisine. For example, chicken inasal (an Ilonggo dish), well-known in the Philippines and the mainland, could become an instant local favorite like lumpia, pancit and adobo if given the exposure. 

We extend a big thank you to the Philippine Consulate in Honolulu for once again spearheading this popular community project. Filipino Food Week is the project of the Cultural and Economic Section of the Philippine Consulate General. FFW Hawaii is an adaptation of Filipino Restaurant Week (FRW) that started in New York in 2015, organized by the Philippine Consulate General in New York. We wish much success to the organizers and participants of this year’s FFW in Hawaii.

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