A Filipino Restaurant Owner Says Shame May Be One Reason Authentic Filipino Food Has Not Become Mainstream

We heard from Nicole Ponseca, who is on a mission to bring Filipino food to the American masses. She has created two New York City Filipino restaurants: Maharlika and its gastropub cousin Jeepney. Both opened in 2012, five blocks apart from each other in New York City’s East Village.

“I’m doubtful that Filipino food will be on every corner, like Chinese or Thai food in New York,” Ponseca says. “But I’m curious about how other chefs will interpret Filipino food, who aren’t Filipino at all.”

So we asked Ponseca about the challenge of trying to introduce a new cuisine into this “global nation.”

Why do you think Filipino food has not broken into the mainstream American restaurant diet?

Filipinos are the second largest Asian minority group in the United States, and in the top tier of highest educated and income. And we speak English in the Philippines — it’s a mainstream language for us. We fought in the US military, we were allies of the United States and had a military base. Yet we know food from Thailand, Korea, and Vietnam more than we know Filipino food.

One of the reasons could be that we were not raised to be entrepreneurs. We were raised to be doctors, lawyers — risk-averse careers. I do think there’s a Filipino renaissance right now with artists and entrepreneurs.

Second, there’s a [Tagalog] word called hiya, which means shame. That’s why [some restaurants] give the “white-man menu” [to customers] because they think they’re not going to like dinuguan, which is a pork blood stew. But why have hiya when the French have boudin noir and the Spanish have morcilla? It is because when you’re colonized over so many years, you don’t value your own culture, even though we have so much pride.

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Underlined paragraph was pretty bang on IMO.

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