Filipino Americans are shifting local food scene
Familiar flavors being blended with chefs’ personal histories
On Saturday mornings people can usually find John Cornelio among the throng of tents at Uptown Farmers Market, where he might be hawking a crowd favorite, charcoal-grilled pork skewers with a banana glaze.
His weekend food stand Toduken, which means “skewers” or “things to be skewered” in Ilocano, has been around since 2019. It made its name with Filipino-inspired barbecue, a family tradition Cornelio picked up from his father, but the pop-up offers more than skewers now.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Cornelio got laid off from his weekday job. In the era of to-go boxes, it didn’t seem wise to limit himself to barbecue skewers, which taste best when they’re fresh
off a hot grill, he thought. It felt like the right moment to flex his creativity in the kitchen and work through his notebook full of ideas.
In metro Phoenix’s growing Filipino food scene, cooks and bakers are reaching for the familiar flavors of the cuisine while at the same time, leaning into their personal histories. By doing so, the next generation of chefs is pushing the boundaries of what Filipino food can mean.
“Authenticity is subjective,” Cornelio said. “You can’t tell me my food isn’t authentic. It’s authentic to me, my memory and how I was made.”
‘Most of my foods, it’s food memory’
Cornelio grew up in Anchorage where his grandparents worked at a seafood cannery and his immigrant parents adapted their Filipino dishes with Alaskan ingredients, such as wild salmon, king crab and candlefish. For example, a sour soup like pork sinigang would become salmon sinigang in Alaska, he explained.
“Filipinos are good at assimilating,” Cornelio said. “In the Philippines there are so many different regions and in the U.S. it’s the same: hyper-regional food based on what ingredients are available.”
With Toduken, Cornelio’s life history shows up in his food. Much of his inspiration comes from roadside restaurants and street food he’s tried during trips to the Philippines, where his grandmother returned for retirement.
The barbecue skewers comes from watching his parents make them in Anchorage, where his mother cut the pork butt and shoulder while his father made a marinade with banana ketchup, a popular Filipino condiment made with mashed banana, vinegar and spices.
For Arizona Restaurant Week he offered arroz caldo, a garlicky rice porridge with diced green onion. Cornelio swapped the traditional chicken for shrimp and added a crab butter, tossing in a side of crumbled chicharon for people to sprinkle on top.
Also that week he offered teriyaki salmon, adding spicy mayo like the kind that comes on his favorite sushi and calamansi, a lemon native to the Philippines. The salmon came with a generous portion of roasted Brussels sprouts, inspired from his time working at Rusconi’s American Kitchen where he made a salmon and baby cabbage dish countless times, he said.
Some of the feedback he’s gotten from “old-school Filipinos” has been negative, Cornelio said. But there have also been Filipinos who eyed his food with apprehension, then understood what he was trying to do once they tasted it.
“To me, if it’s good, it’s good. I don’t care if it’s authentic or not,” Cornelio said. “Most of my foods, it’s food memory. From places I’ve eaten at or things I’ve grown up with.”
How this baker puts ‘different spin’ on classics
From her home in Litchfield Park, Jasmine Gayongala runs a home bakery where she makes pans of leche flan tarts with buttery shortbread crusts; spongy ube cupcakes she tops with ube meringue buttercream; and chewy pandan coconut crinkle cookies.
Gayongala, a nurse, wanted to give her pastries a Filipino twist when she started Desserts RN, a home-based business with occasional pop-ups at restaurants around the Valley. It’s a technique she learned from her own immigrant parents.
“A lot of my parents’ Filipino food, it’s true to the classics, but they have a different spin on it, adding American ingredients like different cheeses, mixing Filipino flavors with pastas,” Gayongala described. “My parents experimented a lot with new things.”
At the moment she wants to add to her menu pop tarts with a cream custard filling made from ube, a purple yam with a mildly sweet and nutty, vanillalike flavor. In the future, perhaps when the pandemic is over, she’d like to open her own brick-and-mortar bakery and coffee shop.
Gayongola thinks it’s great to see Filipino flavors like ube represented more — her brother recently gave her a box of ube pancake mix from Trader Joe’s, though she hasn’t tried it yet.
As a child, she remembered feeling ashamed when she brought pandesal and longganisa sandwiches to lunch while her classmates had white bread sandwiches.
“People were so interested and wanted to try it (my sandwich) too, but I was in America and everybody had regular sandwiches and I just wanted to fit in,” she recalled.
‘There really are no rules’
Kevin Rosales, co-founder of Tempe restaurant Deez Buns, remembered as a kid bringing to school plastic Cool Whip containers with leftover homecooked dinner inside.
While he doesn’t tote the Cool Whip containers around anymore, he did learn to turn that home-style cooking into a business — how to branch out from it. He views food as a way for people to tell a story about where they come from.
Rosales started a pop-up restaurant and catering business called Good Fortune Kitchen, which began with him selling lumpias out of a friend’s back alley.
Since then, he’s dished out what he calls the “hallmarks at any Filipino party,” from chicken adobo to pancit, as well as reimaginings, such as Filipino-inspired tacos and halo-halo stuffed in a doughnut.
He’s perhaps better known for Deez Buns, a burger restaurant he runs with his friend Justin Jin Park of Drunken Tiger restaurant in Mesa. Their riff on longsilog — a breakfast dish with longganisa sausage, fried egg and garlic fried rice — features a steamed baozi burger bun sandwiching a vinegar-laced longganisa, topped with pickled mango, spicy mayo and a sunny fried egg.
Rosales is aware this kind of food won’t please some critics. He recalled one instance watching a Filipino father and son come in to try the longsilog burger.
“I geek out when I watch people eat and it’s a touchy dish not a lot of people are used to,” Rosales said. “When I saw that Filipino family, that nod of approval, it made me feel like my intentions are good.”
Deez Buns recently expanded takeout at Killer Whale Sex Club, a bar on Roosevelt Row. Rosales said before opening his own food businesses, he wanted to own a pizza shop. If that pizza shop ever comes around, diners can expect influences from his Filipino heritage.
“I would probably put longganisa on my pizza,” Rosales mused. “I do plan to explore different avenues of cuisine. If it means opening up a pizza shop or noodle shop, it would definitely incorporate a little of everything.”
“At these times, there really are no rules,” he continued. “It’s kinda lawless when it comes to things like that, as long as food doesn’t suck. I’ve been really just honing the things I want to experiment.”