When I first arrived in country, I stayed at a hostel in Manila called Friendly’s Guesthouse. There I met a British ex-pat living in Malaysia that has been on the road for the past twenty years. He was at the end of a three-month trip through the Philippines, and he really hated the food here. When we talked about the typhoon, Ondoy, that hit Manila last fall, he said the streets were so flooded that the government had difficulty getting food to the inhabitants up north. “You’d think they’d be celebrating,” he said.
This is usually the first and, more often than not, the second and third impression of foreigners in the Philippines. For one thing, the food in the Philippines is much less spicy and flavorful than its Southeast Asian counterparts. Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, even Cambodia use a wider array of spices, giving to food a kick unlike anything you’d really find here in the Philippines. But the reality is that food in the Philippines is delicious, if you know what to order. Continue reading