Happening in Manchester - Filipino Food Festival

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If anyone interested

What date max and where ?

Good questions. Places are going so if interested get on the site and register an interest. There was 100 but now its about 15. It will be the 11th or 18th March probably 18th as 11th is Mother's day. Its going to be in Stockport or Wythenshawe. I think these are the two usual venues the group uses. The recent Valentine's ball was in Wythenshawe

6 places left

the almost total absence of Filipino restaurants everywhere demonstrates clearly that they can't sell it.

so hardly a surprise that they're giving Filipino food away.

And yet we have fish and chip shops, that culinary hoighpoint where variety means a sausage in batter or a savaloy. How the pinoy must envy us our taste....

Better still that other staple... the kebab.

Surely the deep-fried Mars Bar is the very pinnacle of epicurean delights as Gerry may confirm!

Then there is sprouts haha

the kebab is not British but Middle Eastern. However that doesn't stop it from being sold in every single shopping mall in the Philippines. Shwarma is one of the highest profile dishes in the country. It is available everywhere and indicates just how many Filipinos have lived in the Middle East at some time in their lives. It must add up to about 15-20 million of all the people who are in the Philippines, at any one time. In fact shwarma is probably marginally more commonly seen in the Philippines than kebabs are in the UK, although it is common in both countries.

I don't like schwarma/kebabs much especially the way they are served in the UK, but I don't know why it gets the pastings it does as if it's a really low-class meal. Kebabs are by far the most nutritious and the healthiest of the most popular UK fast food dishes and also the most value for money as the portion sizes tend to be very generous. While it is not exactly a health food, especially when punters slap on loads of sauce, a kebab which is not fried, and where you always get bread and salad, is still much healthier than the other popular fast food options.

British vs. Filipino cuisine : kind of similar, really in the way they stand up compared to their neighbours. I don't see too many British or English restaurants in foreign countries either. I see plenty of British/English and Irish pubs, which also serve food, but I don't see too many British restaurants. In fact I can't remember even one, that didn't market itself primarily as a pub-type alcohol-drinking establishment first rather than as a restaurant.

British food is kind of similar to Filipino in that even though it is not too bad, it will never be as good as other neighbouring cuisines. Just as Filipino food looks somewhat tawdry and unsophisticated compared to Thai and Vietnamese, British comes up short when compared to Italian and French, etc too.

for me the two big flagship meals of British cuisine, those horrible fatty breakfasts (American ones, while also not brilliant, are better), and fish and chips, also a fatty mess, give people the wrong idea about it.

much much better is the Toad In The Hole, the Shepherd's Pie, Bangers And Mash, and the classic Sunday Roast Dinner although they have considerably lower prominence. The ingredients of the the classic British picnic - Scotch eggs, sausage rolls, ham hock, Cornish pasties, cucumber sandwiches, pork pies, scones, quiche, cheese and pickle with an inadequate salad (the inadequacy of the salads is another thing that British and Filipino cusines have in common) a big silly cake with an even sillier name, strawberries and cream and so on, are also almost never sold in British-themed eateries abroard. You have to settle for one of those awful 'English breakfasts', which are always even more awful overseas than they are in the UK. Give me a Filipino breakfast over an English one anytime, although it is difficult to find anywhere where it is prepared and served really well.

I've learned to cook all the main Filipino dishes now. I've had to. There is no alternative as in most places if you want to cook any other kind of food, you are out of luck because the ingredients are just not available.

it is not too bad, but nobody would ever say Filipino food is a world-beater. It doesn't help that very seldom does anybody make much of an effort with it. Good standard caranderias, while they do exist, are rare and you have to look over quite a few before you find one. Even quite expensive Filipino restaurants with all the trimmings like uniformed wait staff and so on, the food can be of very mediocre quality.

I was being fascetious about your blinkered crappy comment but I am sure if you went to the food festival in Manchester ( luckily its now fully booked so no danger ) you would find a cornucopua of flavours. Like many countries, regions have specialities based on the produce available so not all foods are available everywhere. I worked in China for quite a few months and the restaurant menus were singularly tedious and limited. Luckily we found a large canteen that was headed by a chef who used to work in the Chinese embassies in europe. ( He obviously did something really bad once to end up in Tangu ). Once a month he would cook us a Sunday lunch based around a pie. We never asked what the meat was, it was better not to know.

My experience of UK food outside of the higher end restaurants and city centres is that it is bland, often over cooked and either under or over seasoned. Proicing seems to have driven quality down further. Seasoning meaning only salt in many places as well. I'm looking forward to going to the festival, I've been on business and pleasure to the Philippines only a few of times and mainly in hotels. The most philippino food I get is in the restaurants in Cayman that have popped up to serve the local workers.

I will make one undeniable claim though, Phillipino Lechón is so much better than hog roast.

How would you know? You have written extensively elsewhere about how you frequent sari-saris and carenderias - and that is how the word is spelt - even when you're accompanied by the latest pull from DIA. So I really doubt that you've done anything more than read the menu boards outside Filipino fine dining establishments, blanched, remounted your scooter and set-off in search of the nearest el-cheapo carenderia.

There are some simply excellent Filipino restaurants around the country including Laguna, Hukad, Pino!, Rekado Filipino, Sentro 1771 and XO 46 as well as within four and five star hotels in the major cities.

However, the very best Filipino cuisine is not served in an expensive restaurant, hotel or carenderia but is lovingly prepared and served in the home - something else you're unlikely to have experienced.

"However, the very best Filipino cuisine is lovingly prepared and served in the home - something else you're unlikely to have experienced."

I have cooked for Filipinos often, their dishes. Like bola bola, sinigang, caldereta, adobo, lumpia shanghai, pancit canton, you name it, I can do it. I bet you never do, and never have - even though Filipino is a very easy cuisine to master as any Filipino that knows anything at all about cooking as in other cuisines will acknowledge - it's really very straightforward.

when did you ever see a Filipino cooking school, aimed at foreigners, in a tourist location, anywhere in the Philippines? Thailand must have hundreds of them. I'd be surprised if the Philippines has even one. I picked up the basics of Filipino food from 2 of the few girls I have met that actually had any cooking ability, in probably about 4 hours. If I wanted to class myself as being competent at Thai cooking, I'd have to go to cooking school for eight hours a day for at least a week.

of course I've had Filipino food in Filipino homes. Probably more of them, as in a higher number of them, and in more different parts of the Philippines, than you have. Loads of times I've stayed in Filipino houses and ate what they ate. Sometimes, when it's a big buffet-type spread like during a fiesta or at Christmas, it can be almost as good as anywhere in Asia. But most of the time, when you are eating what they are eating, it's pretty uninspiring - there is a very narrow range of dishes usually. And that narrow range, is not just about poverty. I've eaten in humble Thai family homes too and with them it is just a totally different level. It is not just Thai eateries and restaurants that are so much better than the Philippines. Eating in their houses is much better too. It's just a superior, and more advanced cuisine. Even when Filipino IS done well, as well as it can be, which is sadly not all that often, it has no chance of being as good as that.

I would never describe food I have eaten in English homes as good examples of British cuisine nevermind international cuisine.

Yet more self opinionated puerile nonsense from yourself, you seem to have a gift for it!

You all too frequently unfavourably compare the Philippines with Thailand although I've yet to read that you prefer Thai women to Filipinas. Why do you repeatedly sentence yourself to spending five months of the year in a place where you don't enjoy the food when you'd much rather be in Thailand where, according to you, everything is so much better?

As I said before, you're running true to form, Whippy, and I give you less than a month before you are, yet again, banned.

The difference between Thai and Filipino
food is most striking at street level, in Thailand I could confidently eat anywhere in the Fils one has to find fusion places that gear towards visitors its a different ball game as is accomodation thats not a critisism just for me subjective fact

There are very nice places to eat cheaply in the Fils but you need to work to find them

Follow the locals if its busy then its a local preference i prefer the street side to the major players, thats how it is for me,when in town live like the locals after all thats one of the reasons you are there.

Dog anyone

It very much often depends on how anything is cooked. A lot of British food can be very poor or very good and tasty and it is down to the ingredients used etc etc.

A Sunday roast can be pretty crap and tasteless on the one hand and fantastic on the other.

I get the impression it is the same for Filipino food. I like some Filipino food but some I do not like. I cannot eat some of the offal type food that my girl chomps her way through.

It is a shame the Manchester Filipino Food Festival is full. 100 isn’t many really.

I saw this from World Remit the other week and thought it was interesting:

https://z-1-lookaside.fbsbx.com/wor...4oRGzwHR1HrHi5phkykSEM1JmigtUaPr5RuMQt1pmTzW0