The Philippines in Manhattan

The Philippines in Manhattan: Dining at Grill 21 on the East Side. It’s well known to Filipinos, but awaits discovery by others. (Photo: NYTimes.com)

This article from The New York Times briefly touches on some Asian food options in NYC besides Chinese and Indian. Asia is a big continent and there are more choices besides General Tso's Chicken and Lamb Roganjosh. Filipino food gets a nice mention here with a restaurant called Grill 21 on the East Side.

Growing up in an Italian neighborhood, I learned over time that my own culture's cuisine was not widely appreciated by my friends. My friends would have me over to their apartment for dinner, I would learn to appreciate homemade gravy (usually a family recipe for red sauce passed down from generation to generation and is top secret ... my younger sister married into an Italian family and she can't share her mother-in-law's recipe with me!) and meatballs, eggplant parm, veal parm and spicy chicken parm on linguine.

At our apartment, the rice cooker was on for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I thought it was normal to eat white rice with Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. And, to have salty fish, eggs (sunny side up) with white rice and fatty sausage for breakfast. Lunch or dinner could be pork marinated in vinegar or oxtail stew with peanut sauce with plenty of white rice. When my friends would come over for a meal, they wouldn't eat a thing. If my Mom made lumpia (Filipino egg rolls with minced pork, celery and carrots -- no cabbage like the Chinese version), my friends would fill up on that because it at least looked familiar. I think my friends were scared of our food and it took me a while to figure that out.

My cousin in Chicago, a successful corporate accountant, told me a few years ago that she stopped bringing in lunch to her office altogether. Co-workers would remark to her, "What died in here?" after heating up her lunch in the break room.

No wonder Filipino cuisine hasn't taken the US by storm! My Dad had a Filipino restaurant in Jersey City for many years (and, yes, I worked in it!) and we rarely saw caucasian people inside the restaurant ... that is unless they were married to a Filipino! When your country of origin's food appears on "Fear Factor" and not on the Food Network ... you're way outside the mainstream.

From the NYT article:Philippines
They may be one the biggest immigrant groups in the United States, but for some reason Filipinos never flocked to New York. But they will be flocking to St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Sunday, Sept. 28, at 2 p.m. for the Feast Day Mass of San Lorenzo Ruiz, the first Filipino saint. If you can’t make that — or even if you can — a more tangible feast is available anytime at Grill 21 in the Gramercy Park neighborhood. With its burger-and-fries name and side-street location, it has done a fine job of hiding from everyone but Filipinos, who head there for comfort food around brunchtime on weekends — and a menu that features tysilog, which is garlic rice, eggs and a dried, salted fish called tuyo that you dunk in a salty sauce.