In March 2018, the New York Times, America’s newspaper of record, declared, as if by decree: “Filipino Food Finds a Place in the American Mainstream.”
Three years prior, in April 2015, the Washington Post had proclaimed: “At long last, Filipino food arrives.”
You cannot discuss Filipino food and its arrival in the American mainstream without mentioning Nicole Ponseca, the owner of Maharlika, Jeepney, and Tita Baby’s, all operating within New York City’s highly competitive restaurant world, and chef Miguel Trinidad. Together, they celebrate and centralize Filipino culture like no other restaurateur and entrepreneur.
Filipino food is the original fusion food, an idiosyncratic mélange of cultures and tastes, from Malay and Arab to Chinese, Spanish, and American. All that mixing makes Filipino food wholly original, much like the Filipino people, who are scattered all over the world, a diaspora numbering in the millions, almost four million of whom are in the United States. We are our food, with a special kind of pride that permeates the preparation and presentation of every delicacy. Nicole embodies that Filipino pride, which seeps through every page and every recipe in this book.
I met Nicole on New Year’s Eve 2011. Like all Filipino professionals in New York City, I had heard about Maharlika. There was a joke going around that when you met someone Filipino, or someone who knew someone who was Filipino, the first question you asked them was “Have you been to Maharlika?” To kick off 2012, I wanted to introduce my friend Jehmu Greene, an African American woman from Texas and the former president of Rock the Vote and the Women’s Media Center, to Filipino food, which she hadn’t tried before. I figured it was time to see if Maharlika lived up to all the hype.
Upon entering the restaurant, walking past a chalkboard featuring the “Tagalog Word of the Day,” I was struck immediately by the crowd. There were some Filipinos, but there were more non-Filipinos. Up to that point, I’d never seen non-Filipinos eat at a Filipino restaurant without a Filipino friend serving as the culinary translator, explaining what bagoong is (a paste of salted seafood) and the necessity of suka (vinegar). The bigger shock, however, was the menu, filled with all the dishes I grew up eating in the Philippines. Dinuguan was listed as dinuguan, not as “chocolate meat” or some other whitewashed name to make it more palatable and accessible to Americans. It was as if my culture—and food strikes at the very heart of every culture—were being exposed, not out of shame but out of love. Unabashed, unapologetic, fearless love.
When I realized that the woman with the big, warm smile who was busy serving tables was one of the owners, I couldn’t help but pepper her with questions.
“Why did you open this restaurant?” I asked.
This is what Nicole replied to me, and to anyone who’s ever asked that question: “I wanted to change the conversation about Filipino food.”
Nicole has more than changed the conversation about Filipino food. Part cultural ambassador, part epicurean anthropologist, part pioneering entrepreneur, she has led the Filipino food movement, which, over time, has touched every corner and every nook of what makes up Filipino culture. Instead of merely criticizing and deconstructing how Filipino food was being framed—and who was doing the framing—Nicole and Miguel got to work, constructing an idea from scratch and executing a different vision. What’s more, they’ve done all of this in a food industry where very few people of color thrive, in the process leading a seismic shift in how the global Filipino community thinks about food, identity, entrepreneurship, and what it means to claim ourselves. We all, Filipinos and non-Filipinos alike, are the beneficiaries of what they’ve built.
Maraming salamat talaga, Nicole and Miguel. Thank you very much.
Jose Antonio Vargas, the founder and CEO of Define American, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen.