October is Filipino American History Month, and to celebrate, Chef Phillip Esteban talks about the cultural exchanges you can find in Filipino food. He will also highlight that food in an elegant dinner tonight at Artifact at Mingei.
Earlier this month, I met Chef Phillip Esteban of White Rice Bodega while covering the San Diego Filipino Film Festival (SDFFF). He has partnered with SDFFF since its inception in 2021, so I knew his food was delicious. What I didn’t know was how well versed he was in the cultural exchanges found in Filipino food and how it reflected the history of its trading partners and colonization.
Chef Phil’s origin story
Esteban described himself as part of the “rebel generation” of Filipino Americans rebel generation “because we resisted the secure jobs. For our parents, it was just that you have to make good money, which means you join the military, become a nurse or doctor, engineer. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But you see a lot more Filipinos, especially this second generation and third generation, more in the creative spaces — art, culture, design, music.”
And food. Esteban’s earliest food memories go back to being a child and asking his grandmother to make his favorite desserts.
“Then one day, I was like six years old, and she asked, ‘Do you want me to teach you how to make it?'” Esteban recalled. “Surely so she didn’t have to do it anymore, and I just remember baking with my grandmother. And then in college, I remember still having the passion for food. I think as a Filipino culture, everything revolves around food, whether it’s graduations or parties or birthdays. So in college I was just hosting dinner parties and my roommate was like, ‘Dude, you need to go to culinary school. So I dropped out of college and then enrolled in culinary school. My parents definitely questioned what that path was, but they visited me at the first restaurant I worked at and they could see how happy I was and they. They never said anything after that.”
But back in the early 2000s, Filipino cuisine was not on the menu at culinary schools.
“The culinary world is a heavily white, male-dominated industry,” Esteban said. “So all my instructors were Caucasian. All the chefs I looked up to were Caucasian. So no one was making real Filipino food. And even when you talk about culinary school itself and the way they teach the program, you made every week another food from another culture: China, Japan. But there was no Filipino food.”
But it was Filipino chef Anthony Sinsay who told him, “You have to cook our food.”
And that’s when he got the idea for his restaurant White Rice Bodega.
“I wanted to do something low-key and accessible to a non-Filipino demographic,” Esteban explained. “There are taco shops everywhere, and I looked at tortillas as a vessel, and what’s our vessel? White rice. Hence the name. I don’t think we do Filipino food differently. I like to say that we kind of package it about and make it presentable to everyone. So try to keep it classic, but just a little bit more vivid to the eyes.”
Filipinos make up more than forty percent of Asian Americans in San Diego County. So it’s a great community to tap into. Esteban opened his first white rice at the Liberty Public Market, which had special significance since the area used to be the site of the Naval Training Center.
“When my father was recruited in the Philippines by the U.S. Navy, he came here to Liberty Station,” Esteban recalled. “Liberty Public Market was what we called the chow hall for the military. That’s where he used to eat when he first came here to America. And then I was born and then in my teenage angst and youth he said I had to be in. He put me in a military program to straighten me out. Our unit would march to the same galley and eat there. And then, fast forward to now, my first restaurant is in the same food hall.” Esteban now operates White Rice Bodega on Adams Avenue, Wildflour Delicatessen (coming to Liberty Station), and this month expanded with a new restaurant in Los Angeles located inside Boulevard Market in Montebello.
Definition of Filipino cuisine
Esteban described Filipino food as “one of the most complex cuisines because it’s a balance between acidity (like vinegar), and sweet and sour, and salty because of soy, and with so many different flavor complexes, most cuisines only have maybe one or two things. So I think that’s what makes Filipino food unique.”
Esteban is proud to have pushed with other Filipino chefs to get major publications in San Diego to add a Filipino food category to their best lists.
“I’m very proud of what we did as a team and that it gave way to visibility, not just for us, but for our entire community,” Esteban said.
Cultural exchanges
Esteban noted that when his parents and grandparents moved to the United States, they wanted all the children to speak only English. So Esteban can’t speak Tagalog and it made him think about the Filipino culture and how it is reflected in the food.
“Which led me to go down this path of understanding our own food through our culture and history,” explained Esteban. “The first era we talked about … was the Malayo-Polynesian influence, which brought us rice, fermented fish, bagoóng. And if we didn’t have that, a lot of the staples like kare-kare wouldn’t be here. And then the next region the Chinese traders and that brought us pancit and lumpia. And then you think of Spain when they conquered the Philippines and that was like 250-plus years of influence on food that brought us empanadas, that brought us pork, that brought us bulalo. It brought us corn, and it brought us potatoes. If that trade didn’t happen for the Magellan trade, there would be no sinigang in culinary schools, and I guess on that my instructors would say ‘confusion is fusion cuisine’ where another country actually either colonized or influenced the food in some way. You think of Vietnamese food and they have baguettes from the French, right? And they have saute pan. And it’s not like the Vietnamese say, ‘hey, I don’t want that in our food.’ There wouldn’t be any banh mi’s if they had said that. But that’s understanding history, and that’s understanding our food.”
Then there is diversity even in classic dishes like adobo that can vary across the thousands of islands that make up the Philippines.
“There are 152 different ways to make chicken adobo,” Esteban said. “But everyone just knows the soy sauce, vinegar, black pepper and bay leaves. There’s a very similar dish called tiyula itum, but in the southern islands of Mindanao, there’s a big Muslim presence there, and because of that, there’s this kind of curry flavor added to the cuisine that’s so unique. They take the whole coconut, they cut it up, and then they char it, char the skin, and then they rip the inside out. And then you braise the adobo pork, the chicken , the beef, they add the charred coconut in it, add different spices, they add some peppers and it has an almost curry-like flavor.”
Tonight’s Artifact dinner
It will be one of the mouth-watering dishes Esteban prepares for tonight’s regional prix-fix dinner at Artifact at Mingei.
“They have this amazing restaurant called Artifact and they do regional dishes with monthly themes,” explained Esteban. “Last month was Turkey, and this month, being Filipino American History Month, they wanted to go to the Philippines. We have three snacks that we will be serving, including two varieties of ceviche or kinilaw, an oyster, and then Manila clams with a pickled ginger and red onion vinaigrette. And then the first course is white fish cured in an inasal butter. Then the braised short rib with charred cauliflower. I make like a house polvoron cake butter almost with sweetened condensed milk ice cream. So condensed milk is something we put on everything in the Philippines. And I thought let’s make an ice cream base out of it with some kind of cookie butter underneath. And then like little blobs of coconut gel and all the little herb decorations to make it look pretty so it was going to be a fun, fun night.”
Fun and delicious! If you can’t attend dinner tonight, try Chef Phil’s food at one of his four locations.