San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Daly City Filipino food tour with a pro
This is A Million Plates, The Chronicle's regular column about immigrant food in the Bay Area, centered around the theory that there are a million different plates of food eaten every day in this region.
Despite a 10-hour flight from Japan to San Francisco the day before, then spending the next seven hours cooking and serving food for a Yotam Ottolenghi reception at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Yana Gilbuena is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for our Filipino food tour of Daly City.
With a megawatt smile, Gilbuena radiates nothing but positive energy as she talks about our first stop: Filipino breakfast at Tselogs on San Pedro Road. “I can’t wait to eat some silog,” she says.
Gilbuena is a self-taught chef from Iloilo City, in the Visayas region of the central Philippines. When she came to Los Angeles to live with her nurse mom in 2004, she considered many careers, including behavioral therapy, architecture and antique hardware, before settling at a children’s furniture company. But Filipino food kept calling to her, so she started throwing dinner parties. In March 2013, she launched Salo Series, a pop-up of regional Filipino dishes served kamayan style (eaten with hands, served communally with no plates or utensils). It has since popped up in every state in the U.S., plus Canada, the Philippines, Mexico and Colombia. Since January 2017, she’s called the Bay Area home; it’s where she self-published her first cookbook, “No Forks Given.”
We’re in the perfect place for a Filipino food tour. Out of almost 3.4 million Filipinos living in the country, more than half live in California, and the Bay Area is bursting with 350,000 Filipinos. In Daly City, Filipinos make up 33 percent of the population, so Tagalog conversations are a common soundtrack.
Silog is the breakfast dish that Tselogs (pronounced: chelogs) is known for; the name is a portmanteau of sinangag (garlic fried rice) and itlog (egg). Silog is paired with a variety of proteins for breakfast, Gilbuena explains, and the name for each is a portmanteau of the portmanteau: Spamsilog (Spam), tocilog (tocino, a sweet, bright red cured pork) or tapsilog (tapa is sundried or fried beef, a specialty of Tselogs owner Chel Gilla’s native Parañaque).
Gilbuena orders the tocilog and tapsilog without hesitation, along with lumpiang Shanghai, the fried spring rolls filled with ground pork. Rice was the staple of her childhood breakfasts, she says. “I went through a cereal-eating phase in high school . ... Grandma was like ‘What, are you Ameri-kan? Eat your rice!’ ” she says, laughing.
Tselogs is a bit like Gilbuena’s second home, she says, as steaming mugs of caldo, a rich chicken soup, arrive at the table minutes after ordering. She releases a happy sigh as she sips and recounts her first meeting with owner Chel Gilla.
She was relatively new to the Bay Area when she remembers asking Gilla for some brown sugar for her coffee. But once added, it made the drink weirdly salty. Gilla realized she had mistakenly shared the tocino spice mix for her cured pork, which is also made with brown sugar. “We laughed, started talking, and quickly became friends,” says Gilbuena. Gilla even shared her home for a few months when Gilbuena wasn’t traveling, partly to make her fall in love with the Bay Area.
When breakfast arrives at the table, Gilbuena douses the entire plate in palm vinegar, mixing it all together. “I usually ask for spiced vinegar, which has garlic, ginger, onion and bird’s-eye chile,” she says. The result is a hearty plate of sweet, savory and sour flavors. We leave with a slice of buko pie, a coconut custard-filled pastry.
Our next stop is just under a mile away at the Bread Basket, a tiny bakery that has been around since 1977. Nothing from the outside screams Filipino until you get close enough to see the
posters in the windows advertising hot pan de sal and sweet rice.
Gilbuena’s usual order is pan de sal, an enriched bread roll. She prefers it still warm from the oven, and tops it with a processed American cheese like Cheez Whiz, a custom that stems from the American military presence in the Philippines during World War II.
The best time to get it fresh is early in the morning, so our afternoon arrival requires us to go for her second-favorite order, ensaymada. This sweet bread, which has roots in Spanish colonization, is topped with a generous layer of margarine and sugar. She picks the version stuffed with macapuno (soft coconut) and ube (purple yam).
“It’s like an equivalent to brioche,” she says, describing how she reheats it in the oven at home and adds Velveeta to melt on top for a salty-sweet snack. She thanks the cashier warmly in Tagalog, “Salamat!” (I confirm later at home that an ensaymada crisped under the broiler creates a creme brulee-type crust on top that contrasts nicely against the fluffy bread and its sweet innards.)
Our last stop on our food tour was supposed to be Lucky Chances Casino in Colma, but before we can get there, we drive past a Jollibee — or as Gilbuena puts it, “the McDonald’s of the Philippines.”
When she learns that I have never been to one, our plans change. “As a kid, Jollibee was only a treat on special occasions, like when I got good grades,” she says. Her order hasn’t changed since then, either: a Chickenjoy (fried chicken) with gravy, fiesta noodles (also known as pancit palabok, rice noodles with a bright orange sauce from shrimp heads, annatto and garlic), pineapple juice and a peach mango pie.
While in college in the Philippines, Jollibee was all she could afford. Today, she goes to Jollibee whenever one is near her pop-ups. And even though it’s fast food, it’s been influential in her own cooking.
“Whenever I make palabok, I base it off of this version,” she says. The fried chicken skin is shatteringly crisp, and the peach mango pie is everything a McDonald’s apple pie wishes it could be: nice crust, molten fruity insides. Her dream is to one day host a pop-up where she secretly serves all Jollibee food.
And just like that, she’s off again, this time to enjoy a dinner at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco cooked by American Indian chef and Oakland native Crystal Wahpepah. Later, she’s heading to Richmond, Va., to cook another kamayan feast. Gilbuena is not slowing down her travels, but she’s happy to have a supportive home base that brings her a taste of the Philippines.