Fresh Vegetables, Fusion Tacos, and Spice Packets—Lessons on Cooking in the Filipino Diaspora
An Interview with Joseph Bernardo of Northridge
Happy September! The start of my family’s school year has actually felt like the start of fall up here in the Bay Area. That said, I still have a few summery recipes to share with you all, so I’ll be posting those in the next few days so that you can use them to take advantage of the last beautiful produce of the season.
Today, however, we have another fun interview with a California home cook, Joseph Bernardo—an Angeleno and second-generation Filipino Californian. Joe is an administrator at Loyola Marymount University, in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and he is also a co-host of the This Filipino American Life podcast. Joe told me about his childhood in the Los Angeles area, how meeting his wife introduced him to Filipino foods he hadn’t known as a child, and how he learned to cook by turning to family and friends (and YouTube) for recipes.
Joe also shared a fantastic recipe for pork sinigang that is full of rich ribs and bright summery vegetables. Per my new format, I’ll be sharing that recipe in a separate post, early next week, but you’ll get a sneak peek below. (I’m completely obsessed with this recipe, so be sure to watch for it in your inbox!) But, first, here’s what Joe told me about his life and his cooking journey, edited and condensed a bit for clarity:
Joseph Bernardo
I live in the city of Los Angeles, in Northridge. My parents were born and raised in Manila, Philippines, and they met in the Philippines and then immigrated here, to the United States, in 1973. Originally, they were supposed to go to Michigan, but they stayed with a friend here in Los Angeles, and it was January, and it was already cold for them, so then they decided to stay in Los Angeles because they heard Michigan was way colder.
My parents were both accountants in the Philippines and they came here after the U.S. passed the 1965 immigration act because they thought this was a better opportunity for them and their children. I guess when my father was applying for a visa, he said that he would be going to Michigan because if you list that you were going to be in states that are already kind of populated by a lot of immigrants, you're less likely to get a visa. They’re still in LA—they actually live down the street from me and I visit them almost every day.
My brother was born in the Philippines, my sister was born shortly after they immigrated, and I was born here years later. When I was about one or two, my father also petitioned for my grandmother to immigrate here to live with us. So, I grew up in a multi-generational household with my grandmother living with us. She was taking care of me while my brother and sister went to school, and she would cook all the time. My parents don't really cook. My father doesn't know how to cook, really, and my mom cooks but is not a very good cook, unfortunately.
My grandmother made all the staples that you have in Filipino cooking: sinigang, which is a sour soup—usually tamarind based—and a lot of adobos, which are like stewed chicken or pork. I grew up with a lot of seafood, a lot of fish and ginger. (Fish and ginger is a big kind of combination.) And soups.
Then we would always go to parties where we'd get together with extended family and friends, and it'd be a huge potluck, and there would be, like, “party foods.” So, you have foods that you grew up with at home, which are kind of more simplified foods like the stews and a lot more vegetable-heavy foods. But then, when you go to different potluck parties, that's where you get kind of the food that you see in Filipino restaurants like crispy pata, which is a fried pork knuckle, or lechon; if you have a big party, you have a whole roasted pig. And then you have stuff like embutido [sometimes called Filipino meatloaf]. A lot of these foods are harder to prepare, so you don't eat them very often. They're also very heavy.
At the time, in the 80s, there weren't a lot of Filipinos in the San Fernando Valley. We would always have to drive closer to downtown LA to get ingredients. I remember there was a market called Lorenzana, which was on Vermont, and that was one of the first ones that opened, in the 70s. We used to go there all the time, and that's where we’d get a lot of the Filipino vegetables. And a lot of the souring agents, like tamarind. That's a staple in Filipino cooking.
A lot of these ingredients—a lot of these fruits and vegetables—come from the tropics, so, there was always substitutes for those. We grew up with mixed packets. When you make sinigang, usually you kind of boil tamarind, or you boil guava, to make the broth very sour. But now there's a powder that most Filipino Americans use to make sinigang. Adobo is easy because it's soy sauce and vinegar, so those are a little bit more accessible. Some of the more prototypical Filipino vegetables you have to get in the market. Or there would be some cousins, or some relatives, who would make a garden in their yard. So, you’d get fruits and vegetables that way—that was a big thing.
And then, eventually, when there were more Asian Americans and Filipino Americans coming to the valley, they would open up these pan-Asian supermarkets like a Ranch 99. The one we used to go to is called Bangluck. They weren't specifically Filipino, but they had some Filipino stuff along with other Asian community ingredients. Then eventually these Filipino grocery stores start popping up; they're going to build one down the street in a few months.
A lot of the fruits and vegetables come from the tropics, like mango and certain kinds of bananas. There’s still a lot of fruits you can't import from the Philippines, unfortunately, so you can only really eat it there. But, for the most part, you can get a lot of the vegetables you can get here because now there are a lot of farmers in the Central Valley now who cater to Asian communities. So, they would grow moringa, for example, or bitter melon—that's a big staple in our cooking.
In Northridge, I grew up in a pretty multiethnic neighborhood, and I ate a lot of different foods around my neighborhood. A lot of Korean food—I had a lot of Korean friends growing up. There's a famous deli that my friend who's Jewish would take me to. And I grew up with a neighbor who's Pakistani, so I tried Pakistani food. I think Filipinos and Filipino Americans, in general, we tend to try a lot of different foods. So, we’d go to restaurants, and trying different cuisines was always natural to me and natural to our family.
In middle school, I moved to Calabasas. It’s a more upper class, pretty homogenous white community. So, when I went to middle school and part of high school, I was not around a lot of Filipinos. There was a handful of other Asian Americans, but for the most part it was pretty homogenous.
My dad wanted to move to that neighborhood as an investment. It was the late 80s, and they wanted to move into that neighborhood and then sell it for a profit. But what ended up happening was when we moved there, the market crashed, so we couldn't even sell it to break even. So, we ended up just staying there. And then eventually they got out and we moved back to Northridge a few years later. It was a gamble that didn't pay off.
I went to UC Santa Barbara for undergrad, and then I went to San Francisco State; I lived in the Bay for a short bit. I did live in Seattle for three years—I did a graduate program at the University of Washington—but I moved back to LA. I am 43, so 40 years of my life I’ve lived in California. It's home for me.
I started cooking for myself a little in college, but, really, I started enjoying cooking for myself when I met my wife. She's a big foodie. Before, I was always eating, like, college food—like ramen and things you can microwave. But then, after college, I met my wife, and she introduced me to all the foods that she grew up with.
She's Filipino, but her family's from a different region in the Philippines. So, my family speaks Tagalog, which is from in and around Manila. And her family is more provincial; they lived in the northern part of the Philippines, and they speak a Ilocano. So, there are similarities, but there are kind of stark differences between the two communities. And it's also evident in the food. Their food is a lot more vegetable heavy. So, she introduced me to the value of vegetables, and how to cook them like properly and, the flavor profiles that are a little different with Ilocano cooking compared to Tagalog cooking.
Then I started experimenting, cooking for myself, and eventually I tried cooking different cuisines. Ever since then, I’ve kept on cooking different things, trying different things, and trying to perfect things that I’ve always liked. I would ask friends and colleagues for cooking advice. I learned the basics from friends or family members, and we’d have different conversations, like, “How do you cook your adobo?” or “How do you cook your sinigang or kare kare?” And then I also just experimented with things. I also learned from non-Filipino friends how to cook their food.
Then YouTube became a big thing, and I kind of switched from just from looking at recipes to looking at YouTube. I would get into cookbooks, but I would never try their recipes, just because they seem intimidating. I don't know why. I like them just for the pictures and for the history and their food memories. But, I guess, for me, YouTube was always the easiest way for me to learn recipes.
Unfortunately, there are no recipes that got passed down to me. My grandma never wrote anything down, of course. I've always tried to find ways other people have done their dishes and then seen if I can like replicate the way my grandma would have done it.
I also learned a lot from my mother-in-law. They were dishes that I didn't grow up with, but I like the way that she makes them and I learned from them. And my wife would teach me all those tricks of, like, how to hold a knife, what's the best way to cut an onion, and all that stuff.
I think a big key was understanding freshness. That was new to me, really, when I started cooking. I didn't really know where food came from until I met my wife. She grew up in Stockton, so she grew up with a lot of farming communities, and there was always fresh food. I grew up more in an urban/suburban neighborhood. Knowing what's fresh and what's not, knowing how far food has to travel, and just being able to access such fresh fruits and vegetables was something I learned pretty recently (I mean, you know, “fairly recently” in my 20s). That's one thing that’s affected my cooking.
It's funny, my parents don't understand that either. They still eat a lot of processed foods and non-organic vegetables. But then they realize it tastes so much better when it's organic, but they don't understand what I do to make it taste better. I told them, “It's the ingredients.” My family has pretty much been urbanized for generations, in Manila. My wife's family, again, lived out in the provinces. They’re farmers in their community. So they understand that, and my parents didn't.
I'd say I cook 50 percent Filipino food and then 50 percent anything else. I make a lot of Asian food. I'll try to cook like Chinese food, Korean, some Vietnamese. I'll make a Sunday gravy (an Italian gravy). And I'll make red beans and rice on the regular. And then I'll make adobo, sinigang, tinola (which is another kind of soupy dish). My favorite dish is pork sinigang. But the way I make it, I use a packet—the kind of the packet you get from the store. I've never learned how to make it from scratch. Some people scoff at the packet but, I don't know, I think the majority of Filipino Americans use a packet. I even asked my cousins in the Philippines, and they said, yeah, they just use a packet. It’s easier.
Los Angeles has the largest number of Filipinos in the country, I guess we were spoiled in having access to Filipino groceries and Filipino restaurants. They're not as plentiful as maybe other communities’ are, but they still exist right here in California.
And the different food cultures here have meshed and have created kind of this market for Filipino food that's kind of re-imagined. With the proximity to the Latino community, there's been a number of kind of restaurants, Filipino-owned restaurants, that have served adobo tacos or sisig tacos. And then there's a really popular restaurant here called The Park's Finest, and they do American-style barbecue with Filipino flavors. All different kinds of fusiony things emerge because of the mix of cultures here.
More California Stories to Read and Watch
If you, like Joe, prefer cooking videos to written recipes, makes sure to check out the LA Times’ The Kitchen videos—like the recent one where chef Charles Namba makes his mom’s gyoza—which combine cooking instructions with commentary and interviews. In other food video news, KQED recently reported that Bay Area rapper Lyrics Born now has a YouTube food show. And for another interview with a California cook, check out the interview Cake Zine did with pastry chef Lo Hoang.
Book Events!
I’ll be doing a couple of book talks with Magnolia Network star Elizabeth Poett in early October, to celebrate the launch of our book The Ranch Table. On Saturday, October 7th, I’ll be in Santa Barbara to join Elizabeth for part of her talk at the Presidio at 5:30pm (in partnership with Chaucer’s Books), and on Tuesday, October 10th, we’ll be in conversation at Omnivore Books in San Francisco. Come say hi!
Photos: Courtesy Joseph Bernardo (2), Georgia Freedman (2)