San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Top Filipino food in the Bay Area
The Bay Area's Filipino food scene runs the gamut from casual buffet-style eateries to diners, food trucks, contemporary restaurants and pop-ups.
The area is, after all, home to a third of California's roughly 1 million Filipinos, according to the Pew Research Center. Daly City is one of the major hubs, and historically one of the best leads for finding Pinoy food. In recent years the East Bay, too, has risen as a dining destination for purple-hued ube baked goods and sizzling platters of sisig, a specialty of chopped pork and chicken liver.
Soleil Ho and I have gathered a collection of picks that showcase the versatility of the cuisine. We reveled in the Filipino combo plates, gorged on every kind of silog imaginable — the many permutations of fried rice, egg and protein — found crackly comfort in lumpia rolls of all sizes, and savored the strong pucker of sour tamarind-flavored soup, or sinigang.
Filipino cuisine is informed by the Philippines' tropical weather, Chinese trade as well as Spanish and American colonization. While Filipino food in the Bay Area still has obvious connections to its country of origin, we've seen plenty of Filipino Americans shaping the cuisine into a thing of their own. Food truck favorite Señor Sisig wraps Pinoy flavors in a flour tortilla; Lucky Three Seven in Oakland bridges the gap for newcomers and Filipinos with sticky-sweet wings and chicken adobo; San Francisco pop-up Province offers a nine-course dinner of charred avocado sinigang and polvorónes.
In other words, the Bay Area's Filipino food scene is abundant, available at all levels and, in all likelihood, nearby. For more top lists, check out sfchronicle.com/food.