All my Filipino friends on Facebook have been sharing this recent article in the L.A. Times about, despite the abundance of classically-trained chefs of Filipino descent, how none of them seem willing to start a fine dining restaurant featuring Filipino food. The article appeared to be the centerpiece of the Food section for that day, which also included a review of Magic Wok in Cerritos and recipes for nilaga, adobo and bichu-bichu (which I don’t think I’ve ever had, but whatever). The article asks the question: why can’t Filipino food go mainstream and be featured in a fine dining restaurant? Why isn’t it as popular as Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Thai food?

Those are legitimate questions. There’s maybe one Filipino restaurant that would possibly qualify as fine dining in the Los Angeles area — Max’s of Manila in Glendale, and saying its fine dining is a stretch simply because its not a “turo-turo” (point-point) joint. (Of course, Max’s is a franchise, and I don’t know if every location is a sit-down, order-from-the-menu-only type of place.) Max’s also happens to be one of those places that “Filipino society” goes to get photographed, but whatev. Oh, and Manila Sunset in West Covina also doesn’t have a steam table typical at turo-turo joints, but its more like a cafeteria than fine dining.

There have been a few places that have tried Filipino fine dining and failed. I remember one old-school place my parents used to take me to in L.A. where you ordered from the menu and they even had a dance floor — that’s gone. Goldilocks, in their Eagle Rock mall location, also has a dining room, but their food is really not good enough for the prices they were charging.

All the theories offered in the article and in the comments ring true — Filipino food is never as good as what mom made, and that is definitely true when it comes to my family. My mom’s cooking was amazing. Every time I think of pinakbet or kare kare, I kick myself for not learning how to make it like my mom did before it was too late. My younger sister and I have both attempted to replicate my mom’s food — I’ve managed to get lumpia pretty close to what my mom produced  (even though my mom never measured a thing, much less wrote anything down) and my sister got munggo pretty spot on. But the complicated stuff? Those were difficult enough while my mom was around. Trust me, I tried kare kare under my mom’s supervision — and it was not good.

However, I do take issue with this quote.

“Visually, it’s not very appealing. It’s stewed and brown and oily and fried.”

Um, excuse me. How do you characterize a cuisine at one end of the story as diverse, then later let someone describe it all as stewed and brown and oily and fried? This is one of those times when I wish I’d taken pictures of the food my mom used to make for parties. My mom used to take so much care with a tray of pancit and would make it look as fancy as one of her flower arrangements. My mom was also serious about getting the color of her kare kare just right — it had to be a deep orange color, not yellow like what comes out of some Filipino restaurants – yeck. What about the soups, like sinigang, nilaga (which I was inspired to make right after reading these articles), tinola, lomi, arroz caldo? Are these dishes not Filipino because they’re not brown, oily or fried?

A commenter in the article declared Filipino food to be much like soul food — comfort food best enjoyed in someone’s home. When I read that, I paused and asked Trinity if he thought that Filipino food was like soul food, and was that why its not one of those foods not generally seen in a “fine dining” establishment? That statement doesn’t seem too farfetched, since his favorite soul food-type dishes are made by people we know, rather than in restaurants — although Roscoe’s does have some very good fried chicken and mac and cheese. The difference is that soul food has gone mainstream and is popularized by restaurants like Roscoe’s, but Filipino food doesn’t have that one restaurant championing its cause just yet.