The Next Asian Trend

I was food editor of the Honolulu Advertiser as the Vietnam war drew to a close. Having been exposed to the proliferation of Vietnamese restaurants in Paris, I fully expected an immediate onslaught of Vietnamese restaurants to blossom across the Hawaiian Islands. So I rushed out to do my Vietnamese food story, interviewing native food experts to give my readers a taste of the cuisine to come. I waited…and waited. I was young — in my 20s — and didn’t have enough seasoning or sense of history to realize that such anticipated bounty doesn’t happen overnight.

However, I have been intrigued by why Filipino food hasn'’t caught on. Preparing to speak at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone’s first Worlds of Flavor conference on Asia in 1997, I researched demographic trends to gauge which Asian immigrant groups would likely have the biggest impact on American food marketing in the years ahead. I was surprised that in the period 1981 to 1995, the largest group of Asians immigrating to the U.S. hailed from the Philippines.

While we were seeing a proliferation of Vietnamese restaurants (second largest number of immigrants in this period) and Indian restaurants (fourth largest), where were the Filipino eateries? [more…]