LEGENDARY Filipino Food In HISTORIC Little Manila | Fung Bros

The rice is boring. This is how you make it exciting. I'm in New York. When I crave for Filipino food, first thing you go do is go to Woodside. You always see something interesting in Queens. Oh! You already know the vibes. We outside. Welcome, everybody, to a special Filipino episode of Phung Bros Food. Today, we're out in Little Manila, Woodside, Queens. We are here with none other than coast-to-coast Filipino, Ryan Benson. What's up, guys? So good to see you. I'm so excited today, guys. I'm showing you where I grew up right here under Roosevelt Station in Little Manila, guys. So you grew up in this area as a child? Yes. I used to walk here from 58th and Broadway, where my Lola lives, and we would walk here every single day to pick up Ihawan, crispy pata, barbecue pork. I know that this area is fighting for the legal representation to be called Little Manila right now, right? Out in L.A., you have historic Filipino town, and given that, I definitely believe that this street right here, given the history and the culture with all the Filipino immigrants, definitely deserves a designation as Little Manila. All right, so you know we covered a lot of Filipino food out in Manhattan, but we had to come to the source, come to the traditional area. We're gonna hit up some spots that you grew up going to. We're gonna hit up some spots that are maybe a little bit newer, but overall, we are about to go on a journey through Little Manila. I will tell you this. Every time I'm in Queens, I always see some stuff where I'm like, man, that's pretty interesting. Woodside, Queens, Little Manila. Let's go. Hey, what's going on, everybody? I know we're eating some pork in that video, but I gotta tell you about plant-based pork. Yes, you heard it, and that brings us to our sponsor of today, Omni Foods. They are Asia's number one leading plant-based meat brand, and they are now making it to the States. They're in Sprouts and Whole Foods nationwide, so click on that link down below to find one. All right, so Omni has a whole diverse product line with a lot of different types of meat, but I'm gonna be showing you two quick recipes with the luncheon meat, aka SPAM. You know what it is. SPAM over rice and kimchi jjigae. Omni pork luncheon is a healthier alternative to SPAM as it's rich in protein, provides a lot of calcium, potassium, and dietary fiber with zero milligrams of cholesterol. They're 50% less sodium and no added nitrates. All Omni food products are non-GMO certified. I'm just so happy this Hong Kong brand is now being sold in a ton of stores here. I mean, look at it. It looks and cooks just like SPAM. I cannot wait to try the other products. Wow, it's actually meatier than SPAM. It tastes almost like a mixture between beef and SPAM, and it's a lot less salty. Listen, I know SPAM is good, but Omni luncheon pork is coming through with the flavor. It's more healthy, less sodium, and it still gives you that same vibe. So I'm telling you, you've got to check it out at your Sprouts and Whole Foods. It's worth a shot if, you know, you're looking for a plant-based alternative. All right, you guys, we've arrived here at Yihuan, and your name is Jackie, right? And you're the daughter of the owner here. Can you tell us about this spot? Well, my parents started this 27 years ago, and we just started with really like the pork and the chicken barbecue. I'm sure you know that. It became so popular really quickly that we've expanded the menu and actually expanded the place about two times. I know definitely SPAM and SPLOLA. Wow, so you remember Ryan when he was a kid? Oh, yeah. You have a handsome kid. This gigantic platter has arrived on a banana leaf here at Yihuan. Yeah, so at Yihuan, they brought out the big guns for us. I mean, we got the staples here. We have the crispy pata. We have the barbecue pork, the barbecue chicken, the garlic rice, the pancit, the kare-kare with the bagaong. The crispy pata here is my Lolo's favorite crispy pata. I used to come here all the time to have it with him. And if you guys didn't know, crispy pata is fried pork knuckles. Oh, oh my God. Any type of pork knuckle, man. Barbecue chicken. Mmm. Oh, man, yo, I love that char. That's really strong. That's some of the better barbecue chicken I've had in a while, bro. It has like this nice little sweet flavor. And then the charcoal really comes out. Barbecue pork. My grandma would come to Yihuan and would come back with a stack of like 20 of these because my cousins and I all grew up in one house and we would all clamor for the barbecue pork skewers. I'm telling you, this is like the best Filipino barbecue you can have. This is good. Shanghai lumpia. You hear that crisp? That is one of the best lumpia I ever had. This is my favorite lumpia. I'm telling you guys like when it comes to Filipino food, you have to come to Yihuan. Yo, Ryan, so when we're talking about the region of Pampangas, it actually sounds like now that I realize it, a lot of the restaurant owners are from Pampangas. So Pampangas is known for the best food in the Philippines. And so when you look at restaurants, you know, out here in Woodside or in LA or wherever you are, the majority of them, at least the good ones, are going to be from Pampanga. Pampanga sisig. The thing I love about sisig, the pig snout, the cheek, the jowl, the best parts of the pig, the fattiest parts all in one dish. All right, you guys, we have two really different dishes, the kare-kare and then the pancit, right? The pancit has a little bit more of the Chinese influence, but I feel like this is pure, you know, island. Kare-kare, I believe, is one of the only peanut butter dishes, I would say, in Asia. You don't really see that many stews that have peanut butter. And it has oxtail, which is one of those ingredients that really need to cook for a while. I'm going in because, you know, this is... Wait, wait, wait, wait, guys, you forgot the bagoong. Oh, the bagoong. You guys got to do one thing to really make me happy, and that's try this avocado shake. You swear by this avocado shake? I swear by it. It is my favorite drink. Okay, I could see why. It's addicting, I'm telling you. The avocado has already been blended with something sweet already, so I thought it was going to be straight-up just raw avocado with that very healthy vibe to it. The avocado has already been desertified. As far as traditional Filipino restaurants I've been to, this is the best one. Ryan, I'm so glad we got to come here. Not only is it dear to you, but actually the food lived up to it. What a great start to our journey. Yeah, man, I'm happy that you guys gave me the opportunity to show this place to you. It means so much to me, and thank you, guys. All right, moving on to our next spot that's right around the corner. It is Casina, and introducing the new spot, we got Carrie B. from the Bronx. What's up? Hey, guys. Carrie B., you're from the Bronx originally, but you lived in the Philippines for a number of years, right? Yeah, so I lived in the Philippines for six years. Nursing school, like every other kid that wants to get a better education from Dumb Chief. But the quality of care is the same, right? The quality of care is top-notch. If you've been in any hospital, Grey's Anatomy, don't count. That was not authentic representation of a nursing staff in Grey's Anatomy. No, it was not. Dialogue, you know, for me to your tita's, mami's, whoever. All right, yo, we got to get into Casina because, Ryan, I heard that they have some really unique-looking dishes, right? Yo, so Casina is really famous for this gigantic calamari that, like, hangs from this, like, little skewer thing. I'm so excited to try it. I love squid. I don't know about you guys, but... It kind of looks like something out of a movie, right? Yeah, it kind of looks like this little alien-looking thing. Well, let's check it out, man. We got to check it out. Casina. It's more like bar music and a bit of dancing. We do a lot of Filipino kind of songs here now. So during the nighttime, we're going to have fun, enjoy, like, you know. And also, we serve the local Filipino food. So, basically, you'll feel like you're in the Philippines. Oh, you got red horse? We have red horse. All right, guys, we're going out in the Philippines. Yo, tonight, we're going out in Manila. I guess that's good. We outside, we outside. Well, I guess if we're at a nightlife place, we got to sing a karaoke song. Guys, we're at our number two spot. What are we looking at? Yo, so we got the calamari gigante here. It is like nothing I've ever seen before. It's almost like an alien predator type thing meets KFC. This is like the real squid game. This is the real squid game right here. Yo, tell me that doesn't look like KFC breading though, real quick. It does. Dude, it was some of the tentacles were falling off and I was just like, yo, this is like crazy. So what I think is cool about Casina is that it's trying to recreate like Filipino nightlife, right? Like the stuff that you would see in Manila. Gigante calamari. This is Filipino bar food at its finest, guys. The breading on this is so crispy. It's so fried and the vinegar complements it perfectly. It helps cut through that fattiness, that like real richness of the fry. So Per, you're familiar going to like these Filipino bar spots, right? So like back in the day when I was going to nursing school, we used to go to this spot called Central. It's like, it's not really low-key because it's mad packed and there's like picnic tables everywhere and everybody drinks. Everybody gets like seasick, things like that. So it's more like, this is like bar drinking food, something you can, like pika pika, that's what we call it, you eat with your hands. So everything's like pika pika. You pick up, you eat with your hands. Like that, I would eat with my hands. The squid, I would eat with my hands. Pika pika, like Pikachu. Yeah, but there's nothing to be confused with Pikachu. You guys got to get down on the cheese mussels. Oh my God. Do you know what's different? They use cheddar cheese, but it's sharp cheddar. The cheese, it's so perfect with it. You gotta have a nice sharp cheese to kind of stand up to the flavor of like the mussels. Okay, we are here with Filipino bar food expert, Keri. What are we looking at? Because you were insistent that we get the garlic rice or white rice with this dish. So honestly, what you got to do is you got to take this and you got to slather all that sauce with your rice. Take a little bit of shrimpy. And this is, this is shrimp with salted egg yolk, right? Yes. So all of it, it's like sweet, savory, and creamy. You were saying that this dish to you sort of like embodies the whole Filipino flavor palette. You know what? Every Filipino dish, I feel like it's very distinct, but they all have to carry like a lot of flavor, like things like that. Like you have to, because the rice, if the rice is boring, this is how you make it exciting. Your entree, you got to make it exciting with this. Like everything got to have sausao. You got to have sausao, that's like to soak up. I don't know how to say it. Like you soak up the rice and things like that. With the sauce. Juice, juice is temporary. Sauce, sauce is forever. All right, you guys. This is the salted egg yolk shrimp. They do it really good here. And you get that like coconut flavor with the salted egg yolk. It's a nice like flavor balance. Wow. Oh, man. You know it's good when you want to eat the shell. All right, you guys. This spot have a lot of new desserts. Traditional, but I think the presentation is like fusion. A little new. I wouldn't say fusion, but a little new age. Right here, we have my favorite Filipino dessert. We have turon, which is plantains and sometimes jackfruit wrapped in an egg wrapper and then fried. We got the biko, right? It kind of looks like a toffee pudding. So they actually make it in the banana leaves, like the rice, the sticky rice. And then they have like brown sugar, things like that. And I guess they put it on a sizzling plate just to keep the like the hotness with the ice cream. That's, I've never seen this before. They do the turon really nice here. The wrapper is actually super thin. So a lot of what you get is just the plantain. It's so good. Yo, this kind of a, yeah, it does taste a little bit Spanish with the plantain. And it's essentially like a Maduro's inside of an egg roll wrapper with ice cream on top. It's actually really, really good. Oh, that might be one of the best things I ate today. Bring the biko, biko. I'm bringing it back. David, don't get hit with the biko. You got a biko charge. That's what you're trying to say? You got a biko charge. Everybody was like, what? I got the federal biko. Sorry, I know. I was like, wait, what's going on? All right, you guys, we're wrapping it up. We just had like the ultra traditional food where there was a lot of like grandmothers there at Ihawan. Then we came here. It was lit like Manila 2021. Where are we off to next? We're about to hit the Philam market and see what little goodies we can procure. All right, so the next spot we got to go to, I heard that you guys just told me it's like the Filipino market. In fact, it's called Philam. So literally, I've been going to this spot since I was over here. Then you know this is the spot to go get all your shit. You guys probably ran into each other as kids here, but you guys just didn't know each other. I'm 94. I'm 93. Wow, y'all about the same age. And you're both mixed Filipino. You're half Irish, half Filipino. You're half Bronx, half Filipino. You already know the vibes. We all signed. All right, yo, Jon Jon came through, man. Yo, what's up, New York City? Let's ******* go. Say the Philippines come through. Manila all day, baby. Jon Jon, what do you know about Philam market here on the corner in Woodside? So Philam has been here for many, many decades. Even before I was here in New York, I think. I'm originally from the Philippines. Came here when I was two. I'm pushing that old age. But say it's been here about roughly about four to five decades. Thinking through pretty much this is the staple for people to come and get their Filipino needs, their food. If you wanted to wire money, you could either wire here, across you from the Filipino bank or even here itself. So pretty much mom and pops all grew from here itself. If you grew up in New York and see Woodside for what it is, pretty much it attains its real Filipino culture and value starting here. All right, guys, we are inside Philam market right now. What are we looking at? So if you go into Philam market when you were a kid, you're going to look to the left because they got all the chips here. This is all your little pizza. This is designed for the children. The prawn crackers right here. You got the cracklings. Nah, I gotta see. Where's the piattos? Oh, those were fire growing up. You gotta have these. You gotta have the chippy chippy right here. I used to put these on my fingers like they were rings. Yeah, and then you just bite them off. You bite them off. All right, so right here, we have the bakery section. You have ensaymada. You have pandesal. Yo, I remember eating these at Krista Cobb's house all the time. I think I might have to get one of these. This was my favorite pandesal growing up. You take this, you warm it up a little bit, put a little butter. Oh man, it is heaven. So Christmas in like the Philippines, they call it the bird month. So once it hits September, November, October, December, all that shit. All the bird months, that's when we start coming out with these paroles. Because it starts getting cold, so they be like, birr. If you've ever been to a Filipino's house, you'll see this bottle everywhere in their house. Succa. Vinegar. This specific brand, we put it on everything. This is the OG walis or the OG weapon that your mom used to beat you with. Bro, that's the one that all the comedians always talk about? Yeah, this is the one. Is this like a broom or what is this? It's a broom. It's made out of bamboo, shredded bamboo. But as you guys know, if you've ever been hit with bamboo, that shit, it snaps, it hurts. This is not fun to get hit by. But it gets in all the crumbs and shit. This is my Lolo's favorite snack. This is the tito al chicharrones. You take this, you put in a little bit of succa. It is delectable. Guys, you got to try this. All right, you guys, I got the ube ensamada. You got, Andrew, these are the chashio paus, right? The Filipino chashio paus. Chashio paus with asado. And then we got the ube butter crackers, right? Dried mango. You said number two exporter in the world, right? These are literally my favorite things, my favorite desserts. I don't know what to say, but I know how to speak Tagalog. They all think I'm just an American. But I mean, I'm both. My father speaks Tagalog growing up, you know. And that's all I know. He didn't know English coming over here. And I spoke to him in both languages. Jojo, you go off on some Tagalog. Just a little bit, you know what I'm saying? So all the Filipinos out there, come lang dito. Support Filipino people. Of course, this is what it is. They want to see what balut is. Balut makes you hard, man. I need the balut. Just one, you're not going to get hard. Two balut. Just one, you won't get hard. Oh, bam, you want it with the knuckles? There we go. Oh, snap. Ready? Way too much. Add some juice in there. Baby. Hit him up. Get in there, boy. Wow. It's starting to wrap up. But we got like one or two more spots, man. Where's the next one? Next one, we're going to Purple Dough. Let's go, baby. All right, you guys. We're at Purple Dough. We're with? Mark. Welcome to Purple Dough. We're a Filipino-American bakery. What are your most famous dishes? Well, it's the lupe lechupon. You guys can come in and check it out. It's a half-pan, half-cake kind of thing. All right, you guys. Purple Dough. Mark, please break down for us what we're looking at. We have the lupe cupcake here. Our signature item, the lupe lechupon. It's a half-lechupon, half-cake. And we got our cake donuts here. It's a cake-based donut, a dough donut. And we have the coconut pandan, the lupe, obviously, with the toasted rice flour called pinipig. And the calamansi, which is a Filipino lemon lime. Oh. The calamansi cake donut. Calamansi donut. Guys, if you didn't know, calamansi is a fruit native to the Philippines or Southeast Asia. It's kind of like a lime-lemon mix. It's very small, and it's like super, super tart. Last spot on this little manila crawl. We actually went outside a little bit of Woodside. We are right inside of Sunnyside, which is right next to Woodside. And we're outside of Tito Rad's. Tito Rad's is known to do an elevated traditional Filipino food. They have really good sinigang, it's really known for. We got the really good Bicol Express, kare-kare, laing, like things like that, like things like the ukoy, tokwat atbaboy, things like that that you'll see that we're gonna be trying inside. Some braised pork with soy sauce, you know, just a real mixture, multi-pot of like Asian food all together is gonna be right here at Tito Rad's. I hear a lot of people talk about this spot, so let's go in. All right, guys, so this is the first dish at our new spot, Tito Rad's, which was established in 2006. This dish is called ukoy. Ukoy is like a fried assortment of vegetables, kind of like sweet potato, cassava, mung, and it's in a rice batter, and it gets super, super crispy, and then you put like a version of suka on it. Key to this, too, it also has small shrimp in it. Ukoy. Take a look at what we got here. There's sprouts inside. Usually, I've never had deep-fried bean sprouts. It's the perfect drinking food. Like you get that nice, salty, crunchy vinegary, and it washes down really nice with a red oolong. All right, you guys, all the dishes have arrived here at Tito Rad's. This is like the new hot spot. All the Filipino foodies talk about it. Betz, what are we looking at? We have sinigang. Our boy over here, we have equal express goat, kind of like caldereta, as well as a jackfruit, shrimp. Laing. That's laing. So this spot is going to be, what, a little bit more like higher-end, higher-quality, or trying to be like a little bit fancier? I think this spot is just more well-known. Everybody comes here to bring like their family friends to come over here because the food is so good here. But we're not in Filipino town anymore. We kind of went like one mile, and then we reached here. So this is outside of the immediate Little Manila. And it kind of goes to show like even though we're a mile out from Little Manila, the kitchen was slammed with orders. Not just people sitting in here, but people ordering. So that's how you know this place is legit. So I like to dump my rice actually inside the soup because it just sinks in. You don't do that too. You dump it, you get a little bit of everything, you cut it up, get the pork. Okay. You get just all the mixtures and just eat it. Sinigang here at Tito Rad's. Oh man. That tamarind comes out really nicely in the sinigang. So sour. The meat's super tender. And then the vegetables are also really well-cooked. It's a rainy day, and it's cold. Get some sinigang. Alright, so this is Bicol Express. It comes from Bicol, obviously. Bicol is our city? Um, I don't want to say the wrong thing, but I believe it's a part of the Philippines. And then over here, we've got a goat curry almost. Andrew, this looks like it could be from a number of cultures. Vietnam, Jamaica. Yo, I just want to say like, I've had a lot of Filipino food. I've never had the spicy goat dish, okay? It's got like potatoes in it. It has your sauce. It has kind of like your deep, dark spiciness. This is a deep cut. Bicol Express. Spicy goat. Those goat pieces were so big and juicy. Man, that was high quality, man. I'm telling you. That was really good. So our last two dishes here at Tito Rod's is we have a soy sauce braised adobo pork. Okay, and then we here, we have this creamy jackfruit latin. My stomach is so full right now. The one thing about Filipino restaurants, they give you quite the portion. Alright, you guys, that brings us to the very end of our first Woodside Little Manila Crawl. Man, it was such a dope experience. Very unique. What were you guys' major takeaways? This episode kind of means a lot to me. I grew up here in Woodside, and it really brought me back to Calda just to have all these little bites from all these places that I've been as a child. The crazy thing is, it tastes just as good as when I was a little kid, if not better. Basically, all I gotta say is like, because like I was born and raised in the Bronx, like coming to Queens was like a trip for us as a family. Like every Sunday, we would go like to Crystal's, OG Filipino spot in Woodside, or Ihawan, Cabayan, like things like that. I just like coming to Queens in general because I can get my favorite like Filipino snacks, food. Hey, I think if you do everything that we did in the video or even half of the things, it makes the trip out of Queens super worth it, even if you don't live in the area. But I gotta say, the food is all very fairly priced. I mean, we're in Queens. No frills. They keep it real. It's very cheap. It's very affordable, and it's very authentic. And that's what I loved about Woodside, Queens. No frills, keep it real. Ihawan Grill. Ooh! Yeah, it was good. You know the vibes. Like, subscribe, comment down below what you think was your favorite spot. If I fucked up, if they fucked up, tell us if we fucked up on some shit. Let us know. Because we weren't 100, but you know, we gotta keep it 100. Let us know. All right, you guys, hey, you guys, this was a very fun episode of Fun Bros Food. Huge shout out to everybody. Follow their social down below. Benson, always. Thank you. Appreciate it, man. Till next time, we out. Peace! My look makes you hot, man. Every morning, I never wanna leave. Yo, what's up, New York City? Let's ******* go.