Mild Manila
Years ago, there was a little Filipino restaurant at 33rd Street and Gillham Road called the Manila Café. It’s now a gay bar. A couple of years later, one of the Manila Café chefs took a job cooking in a Middle Eastern joint at 36th Street and Broadway, serving a couple of native Filipino dishes, such as adobo chicken and Shanghai egg rolls, along with the hummus and gyro sandwiches. That place is now an Ethiopian restaurant, a few doors up from a gay bar.
The point is that unusual ethnic restaurants face similar challenges to the watering holes that attract, well, an alternative clientele. The venue either quickly finds a loyal audience or it expires with barely a whimper.
Because a Filipino place couldn’t make it in midtown Kansas City, which boasts a veritable United Nations of culinary options, it seems like a stretch that one would succeed up in the northern suburb of Gladstone. It’s not exactly a mecca for international dining, unless you count the Chinese buffets and Mexican taquerias.
But two Manila-born sisters, Lina Sequerra and Leila Bush, took a gamble and opened a tiny café in the middle of a strip mall on North Oak Trafficway. For the past two months, La Filipina Café has been introducing the cuisine of the Philippines to the northland community — and anyone else willing to make a foray to Gladstone.
I was game for an eating adventure. I hadn’t eaten in a restaurant serving Filipino dishes since I stumbled into a little place in Washington, D.C., over a decade ago. I remember the server telling me that he’d bring me something I would really like. I don’t know what I expected. Rice, perhaps, or boiled fish? Noodles?
After all, Filipino cuisine has been influenced by two cultures: the Chinese traders who introduced soy, noodles and fried foods to the native population and, later, the Spanish who occupied the islands for centuries and brought along their tastes for stews, grilled meats and rich desserts. The Filipino restaurant I visited in the nation’s capital leaned more to the Spanish sensibility, and I was served a juicy steak with roasted potatoes and, for dessert, a soothing flan.
At La Filipina, there’s more of a crazy quilt of culinary cultures. And that’s a big part of this joint’s quirky charm. I can’t think of another local menu that offers menudo (but made with cubed pork instead of tripe), chicken cooked in curry and coconut milk, chop suey, bitter melon sautéed with egg, cream of corn soup, and barbecued pork with french fries.
The explanation on the back of the menu puts it this way: “Chinese merchants … married Filipino ladies and taught them how to cook noodles and other dishes using local condiments, creating indigenous dishes.”
These indigenous dishes may not have the visual appeal or sensuous allure of other pan-Asian fare (Thai and Vietnamese dishes, for example), but they are certainly worth exploring, particularly during the lunch hour, when La Filipina offers an inexpensive lunch buffet. It’s not an elaborate array of dishes, but it’s a good introduction to what the owners consider to be the “greatest hits” of Philippine cuisine. Once you step past the more gruesome “American” items on the salad bar (canned fruit, Jell-O cubes, macaroni salad), the buffet is laden with Filipino fare.
Unfortunately for novices to Filipino cuisine — and that includes me — only half the dishes are labeled. With or without a sign, it’s easy to recognize chicken adobo, presented here as little braised drumettes simmered in a dark, tangy sauce of vinegar, soy and garlic. There’s a vat of tiny, meat-filled egg rolls and another with vegetarian ones that are the thickness of a fat Crayola crayon. One metal tray has a mound of saffron-colored rice with carrots and peas; another a hefty pile of sotanghon, bean thread noodles stir-fried with bits of cabbage, carrots and celery. Another was piled with muffin-sized, spongy rice-flour cakes. The contents of two trays, both heaped with slices of overcooked meat, onions and potato slices, look surprisingly similar. One is identified as “Filipino Pork Steak,” the other as “Filipino Beef Steak.” They taste the same, too. Blah!
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I’ve never been known to eat lightly at a buffet, but the combination of unexciting food and the music — the greatest hits of Celine Dion — drove me out of the restaurant after finishing off my first plate.
When I returned to check out the dinner menu with my friends Steve and Peter, I noted that La Filipina had fired up the steam tables for a dinner buffet, too, with a selection not much different from the lunch version. So we decided to try out the menu, which had exotic-sounding dishes (a whole baked chicken stuffed with ground pork, carrots, pickles, onions and raisins) alongside the ordinary — chicken fingers, chicken noodle soup and, of course, that ever-popular, unavoidable calamari.
I remembered Shanghai egg rolls from the old Manila Café, so I was eager to sample those crispy, pork-filled delicacies again. We also shared some stone-cold tempura-fried shrimp and over-baked beef empanadas. Peter dipped slices of embutido, a baked pork roll akin to Filipino meatloaf, into a savory banana sauce. Poured from a bottle on the table, the sauce looked and smelled like ketchup. “It’s sticky and clear like cherry jam,” Peter said, “but it does taste like banana.” I splashed the shrimp with hot chili sauce and dipped the egg rolls into a glossy swirl of sweet chili sauce.
The lighting in the restaurant was severely unflattering to both the food and the patrons. A television mounted in a corner blared a noisy Filipino soap opera in which the actors passionately screamed and sobbed. A couple at an adjoining table received a shrug when the woman asked one of the servers if the TV could be turned off. I found the show irresistible, particularly when the Filipino version of Joan Collins swept into a scene and started slapping all the men.
I had plenty of time to watch the TV; La Filipina’s kitchen operated at a lackadaisical pace. There was such a long wait between the appetizer and dinner courses that Steve and Peter got up and went to the little adjoining Manila grocer. Steve bought a can of wasabi peas and a jar of pineapple jam, which he threw out the next day when he read the expiration date: March 2005.
I found the many eccentricities at La Filipina — such as the aluminum pot of sinigang na Hipon, which the menu described as “head-on shrimp cooked in tamarind broth with Asian vegetables” — amusing. Yes, the broth was flavored with tamarind paste, but the shrimp were headless (though not de-veined, Peter noted with a shudder). The “Asian” vegetables? Spinach and tomatoes. Steve ordered caldereta, “a spicy stew … with carrots, potatoes, peas and bell peppers,” according to the menu. It wasn’t a stew in the traditional sense, and there were no peas or carrots on the plate. It wasn’t very spicy, either. “The potatoes aren’t cooked, and the meat’s tough and fatty,” Steve griped. I took my own taste, and he was being charitable.
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I had wanted to sample the pork version of “Philippines National Dish,” an adobo stew, but our server, Lina, suggested the chicken instead. “It’s tastier,” she said. My heart fell when a plate of the same damned drumettes from the buffet came out. Again … blah!
“Maybe dessert will be an improvement,” Peter said. He was disappointed to hear that there was no cassava cake that night, not that he even knew what it was. Cassava is a starchy tuber, so it didn’t sound that good to me. Peter asked Lina about the dessert called kutsinta, and she shook her head. “You won’t like that,” she said. “It’s too gummy.” I wish she had given the same description of the flat rectangle of leche flan, which had the texture of sticky glue and a bland, milky taste. Peter and Steve preferred the bowl of lime-green buko pandan, a frosty concoction of gelatin and chopped young coconut. It reminded Peter of something his mother used to make in the 1960s with sherbet and mandarin oranges; well, it looked like that, anyway.
“It’s a dessert that’s just now getting popular in the Philippines,” Lina said, seducing us into thinking we were on the cutting edge of Filipino culinary trends.
We were certainly on the razor’s edge of Gladstone culinary trends. It seems the least likely location for such an offbeat ethnic restaurant, but looking around at the mostly non-Filipino diners in the joint, I noted that they seemed to be enjoying the food a lot more than I was. So for all I know, Lina and Leila may be on to something big. But as an eating adventure, there’s just no thriller in Manila.
