Arroz caldo for a new generation
In the back of an intimate bar in the Mission District, in the last place you’d expect, Janice Dulce was quietly cooking some of the best Filipino food in the Bay Area.
I had stopped by to see her at FOB Kitchen, her pop-up at Gashead Tavern since 2015, which closed Friday, Feb. 2 (a permanent brick-and-mortar location for FOB Kitchen is in the works). We were nestled in a kitchen so small that more than two people felt like a crowd. Yet Dulce looked completely at home in front of a large pot of arroz caldo, stirring homemade chicken stock and ginger-scented rice with one hand while bouncing one of her twin baby daughters with the other.
Arroz caldo has special meaning to Dulce. When she was growing up, her maternal grandma would make the dish for her on cold days or when someone was sick. Filipinos love rice, she tells me, so it’s a dish that’s perfect for any meal (she serves it at brunch). It represents the mix of foreign influences on Filipino cuisine: a Chinese-inspired dish with a Spanish name but Filipino flavors. It’s also the first Filipino food she fed her daughters, Sequoia and Phoenix.
As I got to know Dulce, I realized this scene perfectly encapsulated what was happening here: FOB Kitchen was a labor of family love. Dulce’s wife, Brandi, not only worked front of house and handled administration, but she had been the catalyst for the pop-up, encouraging Dulce to quit her front-ofhouse restaurant job and instead cook the food she ate as a firstgeneration Filipino in the Bay Area. She even not so gently pushed Dulce, surprising her by securing the first location and telling her she had three weeks to prepare.
It was a daunting step: Dulce had no professional kitchen experience prior to FOB Kitchen. She did, however, have a lifetime of memories eating delicious Filipino food. Her parents are both from the same small town (General Trias, in the province of Cavite) in the Philippines, but met when both their families were stationed in Guam working for the military (her maternal grandfather as a barber; her paternal grandfather as a cook). The military gave her family what the Philippines couldn’t: regular income, health care and insurance, along with the opportunity to become U.S. citizens. Her parents both joined the military, and she split her childhood between Guam and San Jose in the 1980s and 1990s.
California has the largest Filipino population in the country, with just under half living in the Bay Area (roughly 400,000). Celeste Noche, a Filipino food writer and photographer who grew up on the Peninsula, told me, “There are so many Filipinos here that we say the fog in Daly City is actually the steam from all of our rice cookers.”
So it’s no surprise that Dulce grew up with a large Filipino community in San Jose. Her dad’s family was based there, including his mom and his six siblings. Dulce grew up with her cousins, 11 in all, and they’d all walk after school to their grandma’s house, where she handled childcare and cooked Filipino foods like pancit (noodles) and mechado (beef and potato stew).
As a kid, Dulce reacted to Filipino food the way many immigrant children do: It was good but boring. “Growing up in the U.S., you just want to eat what the other kids are eating, like corn dogs or pizza. So it was embarrassing to find rice and adobo in my lunch as a kid,” she said. “I was tired of eating sinigang (sour tamarind soup). I just wanted Hamburger Helper!”
But after moving out of her family home briefly around age 20, she found herself craving Filipino food, gorging on it at family parties. She moved back in with her family to save on rent, and started learning to cook. She finally discovered the names of the dishes that defined her childhood, and learned to make them from her paternal grandmother. She cooked for family and friends, but knew she had to learn more for a pop-up. So Dulce took a month-long trip to the Philippines. She visited rice terraces in the mountain province, and took a trip to a palengke market with her paternal grandma, a public wet market where meat is butchered so fresh that none of it is stored in refrigeration. (It was a bit of a culture shock, she admits.)
On the day I visited her, Dulce was winding down her pop-up’s time at the Gashead Tavern, where she had put her own slightly modern spin on Filipino food for over two years. With a brick-and-mortar in the works, she’s grateful she can find most ingredients in local farmers’ markets and Asian grocery stores, like fresh ginger, fish sauce (a staple in Filipino food) and frozen green tamarind, and she makes everything she can from scratch. There’s tocino (cured pork fried in place of bacon at brunch), longaniza sausage and homemade Spam. She grinds the pork for her lumpia herself, and hand rolls each one. In the early days of FOB Kitchen, before she had employees, her dad and grandma would come in to help roll lumpia once a week.
Dulce’s version of arroz caldo is slightly different from her grandma’s. Grandma’s version is simpler, a basic stock from chicken and onion, and served plain, with a drumstick and fried garlic. Dulce makes a more Western-style stock with carrots, onion and bay leaves, and pulls the meat off of the bone so she can stir it back in, making it easier to eat. She garnishes with fried garlic, fried shallots and cilantro, a small amount of fish sauce (“Filipinos use this like salt,” she said) and to help cut the richness of the dish, a wedge of lemon (traditionally it’s served with calamansi, a Filipino citrus usually not available locally).
The finished dish was warm and savory, comforting like a hug from a loved one on a cold day. I watched as Dulce fed arroz caldo to her daughters, both dressed adorably in tiny FOB Kitchen onesies and little Vans. They squawked like birds when she couldn’t feed them fast enough, too impatient to wait for each bite to cool down. “I know I can’t pass my family’s language (Tagalog) on to my girls, because I never learned to speak it,” Dulce said. “But I want to pass the food on. It’s how I can keep my culture alive for my girls.”