Savor Filipino

The plaza was set up nicely, lots of things to see like food demos, filipino entertainment on the grounds and stage, and 3 – 4 big booths for food of various styles. I was a volunteer in the Street tent and had some pretty yummy lumpia, sisig, and grilled chicken. I did not brave the balut. But we had fun preparing all this stuff and yelling out «Balut» to cheer the crowd. It seemed our line was moving along fine and people weren’t complaining. It was a festive atmosphere and I’d like to check it out again next year both as a volunteer and as a foodie.

Just another reason why I love living in the San Francisco Bay Area!
A festival to celebrate the cuisine of the Philippines? I’ll be honest. Even though I live super close to Daly City and its plethora of Filipino restaurants I rarely eat Filipino food. The few times I’ve had it I’ve enjoyed it, but I don’t even know why it’s simply not a cuisine I’ll make an extra effort to go and seek out and enjoy. Maybe because it’s still relatively unfamiliar to me, but hopefully by attending a few more festivals like the Savor Filipino food festival held Saturday at San Francisco’s Justin Herman Plaza Filipino cuisine will finally become a «destination cuisine» for me.
I had a great time at this inaugural event focused on promoting Filipino cuisine and trying to bring it into the mainstream of popular cuisines. I guess I never thought of it in this way but since the San Francisco Bay Area is a melting pot of so many different cultures why isn’t Filipino food more popular than it is?
I visited the event website on the night before my visit, checked out the menus posted and mentally made a game plan of things I wanted to try. To date I could name only a handful of Filipino items I’ve eaten — Lumpia, BBQ skewers, Kare Kare, Chicken Adobo, Tocilog, Sisigsilog and Leche Flan. Savor Filipino would be a culinary adventure for me and I was looking forward to it.
I arrived an hour after the event had started and it was already packed with long lines at all five food tents. From my research I knew I wanted to hit the Street Food tent first. If paying by cash never stand in a line that takes cash and credit. I learned this many years ago by volunteering at these type of events. Look for cash only lines and chances are the line will move much faster.
What I enjoyed about the menu is that all accept the dessert tent offered a sampler plate. The sampler here was to consist of a BBQ skewer, Sisig and Kinilaw, but I’m told some paperwork issue came up and they weren’t allowed to prepare or serve the BBQ skewers just yet. No problem as the BBQ was replaced with Lumpiang Shanghai (
). I’m not a huge fan of coconut anything so I was thoroughly surprised of how much I enjoyed the Kinilaw, fresh fish marinated in coconut vinegar and coconut milk. It was tasty and reminded me a bit of ceviche. The Sisig was interesting in a good way as this was my first time eating pork cheeks.
Next up was the Fiesta tent, but darn it when I got to the window to order I was told the samplers weren’t ready yet. I decided to order the Lechon Baboy (
) instead because, seriously, who can say no to roast pork or its crispy skin? I know I can’t. This was very good, but the skin wasn’t as crispy as I would’ve preferred and I found the sweet and sour sauce drizzled over my pork just a tiny bit offensive.
It’s amazing how quickly rice and meat can fill you up so I decided to take a break. I walked over to the demo area to watch a cooking demonstrations by vegan chef RG Enriquez (
) preparing a Vegan Kare Kare and found some refreshing fruit juices (
) in the process.
I decided dessert was in order so off to the dessert tent I went. There I found pure bliss in the form of my first-​ever halo halo (
). The assortment of textures and flavors melted together perfectly. Life is good!
I returned to the cooking demo area where a crowd had formed many there to see Black Eyed Peas member and famous Filipino-​American chef/​singer/​songwriter/​rapper Apl. De. Ap (
) do his first-​ever cooking demonstration and sharing his mom’s recipe for Chicken Adobo. It was a fun segment, and I got tons of photos and some cool video footage, but all that did was make me hungry again.
By the time I returned to the plaza most of the food tents were sold out of everything. Great for the festival, bad for me. I didn’t need those extra calories anyway. If this event makes it a return in 2015 I too will be back!