Filipino food to try, from adobo to halo-halo.

The checklist

Twenty Filipino dishes to try.

• ☐ Adobo — chicken or pork braised in vinegar, soy, garlic, bay leaf and peppercorns. Often called the national dish.
• ☐ Sinigang — a sour soup, usually soured with tamarind, with pork, shrimp or fish.
• ☐ Lechon — whole roasted pig, the centre of every fiesta table.
• ☐ Lechon kawali — crisp fried pork belly, the everyday version.
• ☐ Sisig — chopped pork face and ears with onion, chilli and calamansi, on a sizzling plate.
• ☐ Kare-kare — oxtail and vegetables in peanut sauce, with bagoong (shrimp paste) on the side.
• ☐ Chicken inasal — grilled chicken marinated in calamansi, vinegar and annatto.
• ☐ Tapsilog, tocilog or longsilog — the silog breakfast: meat, garlic fried rice and an egg.
• ☐ Pancit canton or pancit palabok — noodles, served at every celebration.
• ☐ Lumpia shanghai — thin fried spring rolls with sweet chilli sauce.
• ☐ Bulalo — beef shank and marrow soup for a cool evening.
• ☐ La Paz batchoy — noodle soup with pork, crushed crackling and sometimes a raw egg.
• ☐ Bicol express — pork in coconut milk with plenty of chilli.
• ☐ Arroz caldo — ginger rice porridge with chicken.
• ☐ Halo-halo — shaved ice, evaporated milk, sweet beans and jellies, topped with leche flan or ube jam. Mix before eating.
• ☐ Leche flan — dense caramel custard.
• ☐ Turon — banana and jackfruit in a crisp caramelised wrapper.
• ☐ Bibingka — rice cake baked in banana leaf, a Christmas-season favourite.
• ☐ Ensaymada — soft buttery brioche with sugar and cheese.
• ☐ Jollibee Chickenjoy — yes, really. Ask any Filipino abroad.

At the table

How a Filipino meal works.

• Rice is the base. Dishes are ordered to share and eaten with plenty of rice; the dish is the “ulam”, the thing you eat with rice.
• Condiments are part of the meal. Calamansi, vinegar (often spiced with chilli and garlic), soy sauce and fish sauce sit on the table so everyone seasons their own bite.
• Point-and-pick canteens. At a carinderia, the day’s dishes wait in pots and trays; you point at one or two and they come with rice. Locals call it turo-turo — “point-point”.
• Eating with your hands. Kamayan means eating with your hands. A boodle fight lays rice and dishes down a long banana-leaf table for everyone to share.
• The afternoon snack. Merienda is a light snack in the afternoon — pancit, rice cakes, turon — and, eaten late enough, it becomes dinner.

Regional dishes

Which island for which dish.

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Your Philippines food passport.

• ☐ Adobo — chicken or pork, and whose version: ___
• ☐ Sinigang — sourness out of 5: ___
• ☐ Lechon — the crackling moment, with: ___
• ☐ Sisig — sizzling plate, egg on top or not: ___
• ☐ A silog breakfast — which one: ___
• ☐ A turo-turo lunch — what I pointed at: ___
• ☐ Halo-halo — mixed properly? ___
• ☐ A regional dish in its home town — where: ___

Keep the trip

A Filipino table is a lot of plates. Keep them all.

Filipino meals are shared, which means one photo holds six dishes and a pitcher of calamansi juice. PlateDiary cuts every one out into its own save on your phone, and the meal becomes a moment with the place and time attached. Add the people at the table as companions and their page fills up with every meal you shared.

Island-hopping? The map pins the inasal spot in Bacolod and the batchoy stall in Iloilo, and the place pages remember what you ordered at each. At the end of the month, your Served story gathers it into pages — your dish of the month, your regulars and your new places.