I went to LONDON to EAT FILIPINO FOOD and SPEAK BISAYA

hello i'm commander dart and i love food london is one of the greatest cities in the world history and tradition everywhere you look [Music] i'm here on london bridge this is london bridge yeah i know what you're thinking of that's there that's not london bridge that's tower bridge and this is a big glass thing in front of me and i'd love to tour you around london more but i've got a more important mission [Music] i'm here in whitehall where all the british government happens the british civil service but to be honest i prefer food 14th century legendal market was empty being a sunday and a pandemic and bower markets seemed devoid of life so i headed a bit further right to camdentown security presence was high at the markets but i sneaked a few shots of the food which came from all around the world before settling on a burrito but as i ate my burrito i thought you can find every cuisine in london so how about filipino so i'm here in earl's court in london and this is the traditional area where filipinos traditionally settle but the restaurants i'm going to are in other parts of london more gentrified places like hoxton and here in brixton [Music] but first let's go back to camden town because there's this dirty ice cream shop in nearby kentish town with all kinds of filipino flavors i probably should have got something warm but being commanded out i got ice cream it's below freezing and i have an ice cream it's not gonna melt at least i'm not a fan of ube ice cream normally but i like this i'm struggling to mix this together i'm not the hallo hallo king but aku last i'm eating hallo hallo in the cold in london what's going on with my life i don't know but that's how i got to this stage i think [Applause] approved i'm gonna eat this by myself i spent the next half hour reconsidering my life choices before heading over to hoxton on empty public transport [Music] bongbong's was the creation of lee sinead who won a national tv show with their filipino-inspired dishes today they're filming an instructional video for their shrove tuesday meal kits pancakes which stars lisa [Laughter] [Applause] [Laughter] so guys you should have this box in front of you this was made by our own hands and delivered by our own hands as well and stamped by me yeah as you can tell look at that [Laughter] um so please ignore that [Music] mag thomas which is like the god of all sources in the philippines it's called all-purpose sauce you can literally clean your windows with them it's great [Music] [Laughter] uh it's a traditional dish in the philippines so it's this is a pork traditionally you boil it so it's like boiled with vinegar garlic bay loads of different aromatic and you've got star on eating there we actually so we sous videos so this one is sous vide for 36 hours sorry guys i'm just learning how to do this i've never done this before but it's really smells so good that i wish that i could just put in the oven and so with one hour in the oven to go i decided to use the time to ask lee and sinead about what they do we had a restaurant on hackney road which is only just around the corner here but after the first lockdown we yeah we had to close it all down unfortunately so now we are we're on hobson street we've just set up a prep kitchen place here is called cradle and hopefully when everything lifts back up we're gonna start doing some pop-ups here and you know get a bar running and do bits and pieces again yeah i was born in manila my mum who is around she's around somewhere you'll see her yeah mom's filipino dad's english i was born in manila but then we moved to move to england when i was really young so i was brought up in northampton and janae was well i'm irish i moved here to london about 15 years ago yeah um and i think it was here like a month and i met lee and um yeah got interested in filipino food filipino culture yeah yeah and like cooking wise like so we both we're not trained chefs or anything but like food wise we just we just always love cooking don't we yeah we always just really like catering for people cooking like big meals at home that sort of thing yeah and we just thought like we just wanted to turn our passion into our business so started up barbecue dreams yeah i forgot my questions i always do this i always do this i know what i'm gonna do until i have a camera in terms of your your food now and your filipino food now what would you say is your speciality classic dish i would say um our electron quality has been quite like a big one that's been really popular here and the crispy pasta and the crispy pattern which is what we're working on today yeah but also we do our own take on a catacado which has been really good and really popular and we've done we do a chicken calacado but we also do a roast aubergine one which is a vegan dish yeah um i'd say that like you do really good at double wings as well yeah they're really popular yeah yeah so we actually we took milola's like recipe for adobo and then we reduced that and turned that into a glaze yeah and we use that on a lot of stuff so we do like a fried cauliflower with adobo glaze and calamansi aioli or chicken wings and now we're working on doing something like like big roasted pork ribs with with an adobo glaze on it as well yeah yeah they're the ones are your recipes kind of classic filipino or are they modified to the british taste because i'm irish we we we don't it's not traditional because you're irish only because she's not fish it's more that it's inspired you kind of introduce me to filipino food and your mom and that would be more traditional but what we've done because we're here and it's kind of yeah and we're not traditional filipinos yeah as you can tell like you know i was brought up in bloody northampton you know so we have we have adapted it so it is more filipino inspired so we take what we really like from filipino food and then we kind of like do our own take on it yeah yeah in terms of your main market and and people who buy it are you are you is it the filipino community here or is it more local british people it's a mix it is a mix it's i would say it's mostly british people like foodies people who followed us especially in street food yeah um you know people who follow us on instagram that sort of thing but that's kind of our call yeah when when we're on a show called william how menu which came out a few years ago and from then our filipino base really increased so now we do we do cater a lot for filipinos that's the pork alarm the pork alarm's gone off so i'm gonna ask one last question which i've totally forgotten [Laughter] what's the reaction been to filipino food since you've started really serving it in london it's been incredibly positive really positive luckily we were kind of one of the first people doing filipino street food so at the beginning it was a real struggle wasn't it it was hard to you know nobody knows knew what filipino food was but in the past six years we've just seen like a real growth in filipino food filipino food is really taking off and reaction to it has been incredible that's awesome thank you very much lee thank you and and very nice to meet you and and [Laughter] try again maybe nice to meet you today and awesome what are you doing and of course your mum i forgot i forgot what your name was liam and you're from illinois yes yes and and how long have you been in the uk for oh [Music] oh i fit so 30 36 years in in the uk wow awesome awesome really nice to meet you and i'm just looking at this thing on the wall of which i have none i hope i didn't burn it like filming an interview rather than getting out there oh perfect great perfect perfect perfect interview timing that's what that is i'm professional at something i'm professional at only one thing timing timing comic timing time i mean look at that [Music] but while they videoed themselves putting their crispy patter pancakes together of course all i wanted to do was eat one [Music] yeah you could probably do that all in one right yeah [Music] [Laughter] this here is awesome really incredible it's just the flavor flavor overlooked right there the food was great but they weren't going to let me go without speaking some messiah yeah go on hold it to you when you're asking a question i don't worry about this yeah beautiful ladies and gentlemen [Music] i haven't forgotten my besides see i'm gonna go to another location now on the other side of london so lee and sinead are doing filipino-inspired cuisine but i heard about a guy over in brixton who had traditional favorites like lechon and cinegang [Music] i want you to find out a bit more about this but of course i had to let him cut up electron first so i'm here today i'm in up in brixton in spa on with budgie who i nearly forgot his name speaking of that this this is budgie he's actually he said he was born in compostela which is somewhere that i'm very very familiar with but he you don't remember it no no no not at all i left when i was five so it's been been a while so i grew up in uh sydney i moved to london about oh god eight years ago now i think uh yeah eight years what i'm wondering is what your concept is and how you got started here yeah yeah we started off as a supper club essentially something that i wanted to do so to reconnect with with my filipino roots i mean obviously like i said i i've born in the philippines but then i um i grew up in sydney had an aussie lifestyle and as i got older i it sort of dawned on me that i was i was sort of missing my my filipino roots and and and wanted to learn more i don't speak the language i started cooking when i was in london i was it was a second career for me i was i was in i.t sales before so i i figured the best way to connect to my filipino roots was to cook got a few recipes from my mum played around with it did some cheffy things to it and started a little supper club eventually left my job and um started serap as a restaurant doing residencies and that kind of put us on the map we had a really good review from the evening standard 4 out of 5 stars and that kind of catapulted us and eventually led us to this site to brixton village ran a competition to find the next sort of food operator and uh we won the competition part of the prize was to get this site sadly we opened in january of 2020 we all know what happened as a result of the pandemic and all that stuff um was was created and the idea was to create something that still allowed us to champion filipino cuisine in london but also allowed us to work through another lockdown if that happened and things like that so so we created suraba on which essentially is all the things that we've learned at the restaurant over the years quick simple accessible and delicious philippine effort and that's all we're trying to do here i was looking at your menu and i can see it there's a lot of filipino classics there is your food kind of the classic filipino way or have you modified it a bit for british taste we definitely don't hold back when it comes to you know flavors if it was sour we would make it sour garcinia gang uh fried chicken cinnagon and obviously fried chicken as a sinigang is not traditional but the soup itself is very sour very very just the way you know we would like it you know throughout barwon is probably a good balance of tradition but also somewhat modern um techniques and things like that we're not trying to elevate filipino cuisine i don't i don't think it needs elevation it needs championing and that's what we're here to do we want people to really understand the flavors of of the philippines in terms of your customers are they mostly filipinos mostly local british or a mix when we were open as a restaurant it was definitely a good mix of of customers i think now predominantly it's very much filipino-based or someone that knows filipinos or or has some sort of knowledge of of the cuisine um i guess it's one of those things where when you know when you're at home looking for a for for a delivery you're not looking for you know filipino on ubereats or delivery or anything like that you're looking for pizza burger pasta what what you know things that that sort of you're used to so you know i think that's that's probably been one of the hardest things about um us going into lockdown was we're not the forefront of of um people's minds and um you know we're very much still destinations type type cuisine what's your most popular bestseller bestseller um has to be i suppose our hero dish which you know he's just saw the one the first on the map here in london is uh laton belly pretty traditional in terms of what we do with it uh we serve it with our own liver source not mung tomas we make our own i like to call it london lechon inspired by you know my memories of eating lechon at every filipino gathering that i've ever been to every celebration that i've ever had yeah i i i know what you mean about lecture on those gatherings yeah i get to a lot of it and that's why i have this now it actually is i uh i used to be skinny i used to be skinny that i lived in the philippines for five years [Music] and i was so well fed with delicious flavors and even his underdevelopment chicken inner south having stuffed my face full of the finest filipino food london had to offer i felt something was missing [Music] no not that i got distracted by some awesome supporters before finding the holy grail [Music] that castle's a pub that's my kind of castle so i tried to be clever the queue in jolly room was too long i've got a train to catch but try to be clever and order it for where i'm staying here while i was at the station thinking i'd race it back and then i got to go through all the screens get my order in excited get this like fried chicken burger which doesn't exist in the philippines and then out of delivery zone failed but i did get this there's no bottle opener but trusty spoon it's the only way to do it you know this tastes just like i remember it it's strong there's my ration for today because i'm tired i've eaten a lot and i need to get back without missing my train because that'd be awkward see ya

Channel: Kumander Daot

Views: 281,551

Rating: 4.9808784 out of 5

Keywords: kumander daot, daot, daot commander, commander daot, commander d, kumander d, kumander, anselm plummer, british fish farming philippines, foreign fishpond philippines, cateel davao oriental, becoming filipino, kumander daot official, london, england, uk, united kingdom, filipino food london, filipino london, british filipino, london foodie, crispy pata, fusion food, filipino fusion food, filipino cuisine, OFW, overseas filipino, filipino abroad, foreigner speaks bisaya

Id: d6kqu6d3HgQ

Length: 20min 31sec (1231 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021