Filipino Latinos: From Mother's Kitchen to Hard Times

When you tell someone you're cooking from your mom's recipes, the first question I always ask is, “What dish are you afraid to make for your mom?”

Travail's co-owner Bob Gerken told me that he and his mother, Shawnee, loved to make Filipino lumpia together, “but I bring all the ingredients and help with the prep. I think I'm the one who seasons and cuts it right. But my mom says 'no' a lot. Really, a lot. Whatever I do, I'm usually wrong, so my answer is really 'no to anything.'”

“My mom and I were making tamales and she said, 'We're making tamales,'” co-owner Mike Brown told me. This should be enough salt. You don't need to use that much.And even though I replied that most of it would evaporate, she said, I think it would be better to use less salt and enjoy other flavors. And suddenly I thought, “Am I over-seasoning it? Maybe I need to think about this!” And she said, Are you going to make it that way? It's too late. I was making these lovely little bunches that looked sophisticated and I was just finishing up the third one when she came in and gave me nine of her bunches.”

Brown's mom, Lupe, explained to her son why her tamales taste better and cook more evenly, and that when he opens them, they're a beautiful, flat rectangle. Lupe suggested her son just cut them up nicely and top them with whatever he wants. “Sure, that's what we do! There was a time in my life when my mom made tamales every single day. She knows tamales in a way that I don't.”

The dinner series was conceived when the two chefs were thinking about how the cuisines they grew up eating intersected through common ingredients. “Mexico and the Philippines have both been conquered many times, often by the same people,” Brown points out. “But the layers of history, the influences, create a very complex story in the cuisine. They're both about empanadas, and while they have different regional cooking styles, they're on parallel dimensions. Ceviche is Latin American, kinilaw is Filipino, but it's just fish salted with an acid that's available in the desert or jungle.”

It's not about striving for authenticity, Gerken points out: “My mother lived in the mountains, so she ate a lot of pork. Her pansit (a noodle dish) had peas and carrots. But when I went down to the coast, just 50 or 60 miles from where she lived, her pansit had squid ink and shellfish. So it's always a matter of interpretation.”

That is exactly what they Filipino-Latin Tasting Menu The fee-paying dinner, running until July, will be a multi-course meal exploring how their traditions are woven on the plate, from their pasts, through their mothers, and through themselves and their kitchens. “Because we have to put our own interpretation into it, but a lot of Ecuadorian chefs tell us we're doing it wrong,” Gerken muses.

Of course, as a homage, you can expect plenty of dishes, sophisticated takes, and traditional elements, but above all, expect an experience. Unlike a Friends pop-up or a Haunted Basement, Brown explained, “This is a really special type of experience that we're offering because I think it touches on something very specific to the roots that this whole business, this whole company has been built on. And, you know, we're in our 15th year now. We're not just 20-something foodies anymore. We're parents ourselves. So we understand the lessons that our mothers taught us and we can apply them now. That's something to respect.”

Tickets are on sale now: multi-course tasting menus begin July 11 and range from $135 to $165, with optional add-ons.