The culinary landscape of the Philippines is unique, to say the least. While the country definitely has its own amazing local cuisine, dishes have often been influenced by the country’s long history as a Spanish and then US colony. Additionally, the country’s heavy reliance on tourism in the modern era (especially in the places we visited) means international “tourist” and westernized cooking is often very easy to find, and you often have to go looking to find authentic “Filipino” restaurants. On the flip-side, any visitor will quickly find Filipino cooks can whip up very good versions of non-Filipino foods!
We did our best to try “local” cuisine as best we could while in the Philippines. Most often we were able to get Filipino dishes for breakfast at our hotels – Pork Tocino was a favorite – but we also found many places serving fresh seafood and noodle – or “Pancit” – dishes. We found some Filipino-vegan restaurants as well, and during one of our day-trips we even had a fresh-cooked meal of local dishes right on the beach!
Beyond these local favorites, we also sampled a variety of the international cuisines available in the Philippines as well. We tried Mexican:
And Indian (FYI, we’ve tried and have been ranking these in every country of our trip so far, stay tuned):
But also found a greek restaurant (not just a kebab stand, a full place!) on the beach:
And even a restaurant serving Japanese pancakes and Tonkatsu:
Last, but not least – the Philippines actually has its own homegrown fast food franchise known as Jollibee. You can actually find these in some places in America; but (a) not where we live and (b) it’s still a Filipino brand. Mainly serving fried chicken, but they have other things – burgers, pies, and (strangely) spaghetti – as well. On our last day, we ordered way too much of this (had to get a good sampling!) and it was definitely…fast food.
The Filipino culinary adventure was definitely unique among countries we’ve visited to-date, and definitely a culture-shock between our previous (Vietnam) and our next (Korea) locations!
