April 2, 2014

In late February 2011 I gathered a bunch of friends to go to a pop-up Filipino brunch spot called Maharlika that was operating out of the space of another restaurant that did not open for service for weekend brunch. They were doing things like serving Eggs Benedict with laing and shrimp (Eggs Imelda), making their own vinegar and corned beef, marinating their tocino with 7-Up and putting SPAM on their menu. It seemed like the sort of Filipino place I'd always been waiting for, mixing professional techniques with homey Filipino touches, and adding in mad scientist-like mixes of Filipino and American cooking.

They later opened a restaurant that I used to stop in at for a longanisa hot dog lunch. I heard that the dinner service was over priced and underwhelming in flavor, which was a problem I had with most of the Filipino restaurants that were getting written up glowingly everywhere by white folks.

Cutting to the chase, Maharlika opened this restaurant, Jeepney, up the street to be their cheaper, family style place and once a week they took reservations for "Kamayan" service. That is, they'd make a shitload of food, lay it out on banana leaves, and you and your party came in and ate it all with your hands. Pretty great, right? Jen and Cat were in town for a wedding and rustled a bunch of folks up for this service and the food actually was pretty great. Flavorful and filling, though of course I ate past the point of full.

It seems really strange to think that two classes of freshmen have graduated from college since Cat and I did our senior bar crawl. The three of us here are, like, adults now with jobs and titles and bills and everything living (at the time of this photo) in San Francisco, New York, and Denver. We don't look so different from when we were eating Filipino food at a PSA meeting in the basement of the student union at Ohio State (Asians!) and yet it seems we are all quite for from that time and place in Ohio. Though some good lumpia still seems to be able to get us together.