Ask any Filipino about the best cook they know, and chances are they’ll say Nanay, Lola, or Tita — not some Michelin-starred chef or tattooed culinary rockstar with a blowtorch and a playlist. Our greatest meals are made by people who never trained at Le Cordon Bleu but somehow know exactly when sinigang needs more sampalok, or if the adobo is one flip away from perfection.
Filipino cuisine, you see, is the cuisine of motherhood. Not just in the literal sense, but in spirit: thoughtful, considerate, and quietly nurturing. It doesn’t shout for attention. It just shows up, warm and ready, often with a pot of rice and unsolicited advice. It’s a cuisine that makes do, makes do well, and makes you feel full in every sense of the word.
Unlike the culinary traditions shaped in royal courts — French, Persian, Japanese kaiseki — where food was made by artisans for aristocrats, and one wrong move could cost a cook his job or, worse, his head, our kitchens were ruled by women in duster dresses and hair curlers, not chefs in toque hats.
In old European palaces, cuisine was power and pressure. In Filipino households, it was presence.
Ours is a cuisine born of need and love, not nobility. It’s what Doreen Fernandez called a “people’s cuisine.” It wasn’t written by kings or conferred by academies, but whispered through generations, adjusted by what was in the market, and stewed slowly with intuition and pakiramdam.
Now, of course, the landscape is changing. Culinary schools are booming. TV shows and vlogs celebrate the modern Filipino chef. Men who once couldn’t boil an egg are now making foie gras sisig and emulsifying bagoong. It’s exciting, and I’m all for it.
But let’s not forget: The origin story of our food is not found in culinary doctrine — it’s in the hand-me-down kalderowith a loose handle and the inherited habit of tasting with a pinky finger.
Modern chefs work toward perfection. Our mothers worked toward busog. One serves a plate. The other, a memory.
And while our cuisine has been heavily influenced — by Chinese traders, Spanish colonizers, American occupiers, and now Korean BBQ pop-ups on every street corner — it has never lost its Filipino soul.
Doreen Fernandez once wrote that the Filipino does not merely receive culture; he indigenizes it. We do not copy. We adapt, absorb, and make it ours. Spaghetti came with the Americans, but it’s our banana ketchup version that lives at our birthday parties. We took tempura and made okoy. We turned Spanish cocido into pochero, but let the saba and sweet broth stay. Even fried chicken has found a new life, soaked in gravy beside a mountain of garlic rice.
We change the way we cook, sure. But not the way we savor.
We savor in conversation. In shared silence. In kamayan feasts and Styrofoam-box lunches. We savor in second helpings and take-home ulam tucked into ice cream containers that once held rocky road, now filled with kare-kare.
So to all the chefs out there, whether you’re in a restaurant with a reservation book or manning a karinderya on the corner — here’s a gentle reminder: Filipino food was not meant to intimidate. It was meant to invite.
Our cuisine is not about ego. It is about empathy.
The moment we lose that, we stop cooking like Filipinos. We stop cooking like mothers.
Let the food speak gently. Let it remember where it came from, even as it goes somewhere new.
And if all else fails — serve with extra rice.
