In a city as diverse as Houston, it’s no surprise that a vast number of cultures are represented within the food scene—from Mexican street food to regional Vietnamese specialties, we almost have it all. However, at least one cuisine remained underrepresented until recently: Filipino food.

Isabel Protomartir, who was born in the Philippines and raised in Alief, grew up among families who cooked Filipino meals. “I think I was really lucky to have been surrounded by a lot of other Filipino people and food back then growing up,” Protomartir says. “Filipino food specifically was home.”

But there were only a few restaurants nearby that felt like a home away from home.

Now the cofounder of Have a Nice Day, a group that advocates for Asian American and Pacific Islander small businesses, she’s seen a growing popularity of Filipino food in Houston, as restaurateurs, chefs, and bakers come together to help continue the spread of this unique cuisine.

Tom Cunanan, menu consultant and chef partner for Soy Pinoy in Post Houston with Paul Qui (a fellow Filipino chef), believes many locals weren’t too familiar with the culture until recently and blames a lack of education and exposure. Cunanan, who won a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic for his former restaurant Bad Saint in DC, says he came to Houston to do just that, educate people on his culture.

“Even looking back to 10 years ago, Filipino food was still a question mark to a lot of non-Filipino people,” Cunanan says. “It’s all about spreading the knowledge and doing your research.”

Growing up as a Filipino American, Cunanan says he enjoyed a variety of authentic dishes thanks to his mom’s cooking—especially on birthdays. Cunanan’s upcoming Hermies, a new high-end restaurant coming to Houston this summer that takes inspiration from the seafood wet markets of the Philippines, is an homage to his mom, who died 10 years ago from cancer. When she was going through her treatments, he had her write down all her recipes for him in a few Moleskine notebooks. Many of these same recipes will be on the Hermies menu.

“She helped me find my true passion,” Cunanan says. “She’s guiding me whether she’s here or not. Whenever I cook her recipes, I think of her, and it feels like her spirit is close and telling me what to do.”

Houston chef Andrew Musico, of the Fattest Cow pop-ups and the upcoming Chikahan restaurant, says he, too, grew up with Filipino food because of his mom. He went on to cook and explore Filipino food professionally under Qui as a sous-chef at the now-closed Aqui. In the pandemic he decided to dive deeper into the cuisine—but before he began cooking the meals, Musico first did his research on the history.

The Philippines and its food are a mix of different cultures due to colonization. Prior to becoming its own nation in 1946, the country and its people were ruled by Spain for more than 300 years. After the Spanish-American War, the US took possession until independence, with a period during World War II when the country was occupied by Japan.

This tumultuous past created the fusion Musico grew up loving, which has Spanish, Indigenous, and Chinese influences. Key Filipino dishes include lechón, or suckling pig; adobo, which is made with pork or chicken and often prepared with vinegar and soy sauce; kare-kare, a type of stew made with a thick peanut sauce; and lumpia, which are essentially fried spring rolls filled with a savory mixture of pork, cabbage, and other veggies.

Even lesser known, Musico notes, is that Filipino food has also been influenced by Muslim culture due to the population’s large presence on Mindanao, an island of the Philippines. At one of his Fattest Cow pop-ups a few years ago, for example, Musico served a curry dish called beef kulma.

“I’ve always known that there was a bunch of influences for Filipino food,” Musico says. “I think it was interesting to find [in my research] the more nuanced and small things that came up.”

As for the recent popularity of Filipino food, Cunanan believes social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram are to thank for the growing demand and knowledge. And although Protomartir says she can’t put her finger on one thing, she thinks that natural curiosity has played a role in the rise of Filipino cuisine, along with chefs who are bringing the culture they grew up with to a larger audience.

Musico echoes that idea, adding that Houston’s culinary scene was once a bit behind in comparison to other large cities such as Los Angeles or New York, but that has changed over the years with younger people starting to become chefs.

“I think what happened is that we had an entire generation of Filipinos who have entered the culinary scene and are now realizing the potential that we have to be as big as Vietnamese food, Japanese food, or Thai cuisine,” Musico says. “I think that the whole thing is really just generational to some degree, and I think Houston is now ready for it.”

Another reason for the newfound emergence of Filipino food can be traced back to the opening of Jollibee in the US. The fast-food chain that’s wildly popular in the Philippines, known for its fried chicken, burgers, and pies, first made its way to Texas in 2013. The Houston-area is now home to three locations.

“Jollibee is quintessential,” Cunanan says. “It’s like a Popeye’s in the Philippines. Now, with the expansion to the US, they’ve taken over the capacity market here.”

Jollibee’s flagship on Main Street, near NRG Stadium, is in a strip occupied exclusively by Filipino businesses like Max’s Restaurant and the Cherry Foodarama supermarket—Houston’s own Little Manila. The Baker’s Son, based in Florida, became the most recent addition by opening a location here in 2022. Ariosto Valerio, a Baker’s Son co-owner, says Jollibee has done wonders for the gradual growth of Filipino culture and its culinary offerings. He says chefs are increasingly finding inspiration to cook the cuisine, and new Filipino restaurants are popping up everywhere.

In Houston alone, Be More Pacific opened in the Heights in 2020 after starting as an Austin food truck 13 years ago, serving traditional dishes like adobe chicken, kare-kare, and halo-halo for dessert. Filipiniana in the Braeburn area offers a buffet with Filipino classics. There are other Filipino chains, like Gerry’s Grill, and even a small Filipino cafe inside the Mission Bend H-E-B.

Like Cunanan, Valerio credits social media for the growth in Filipino representation with the younger crowd. The platforms may also be behind the rise in popularity of ube, the purple yam that adds a pop of color to Filipino baked goods. Industry watchers crowned ube as the “2024 Flavor of the Year.”

Pop-up bakeries riding the ube wave include Salvaje and Ube Co. HTX, which offers mini cheesecake tarts made in various flavors like ube and calamansi, a citrus often found in Filipino cuisine, as well as ube tres leches, ube buko cups, an ube leche float, and many more.

Valerio says a goal of the Baker’s Son is to continue to educate the community on ube. He says it’s much more than what people think and, to get an authentic flavor, it’s important to import the yam from the Philippines. The Baker’s Son sells Filipino baked goods such as adobo pan del sal (meat-filled breads), pan de ube, and sapin-sapin, a glutinous rice dessert layered with various flavorings. When Protomartir walks into the Baker’s Son, she says she feels a little closer to home.

“I love it,” she says. “I go in there and honestly, it’s like a rush of memory.”

Valerio says he was attracted to Houston because of its diversity and the younger generation’s interest in the cuisine. Fans of the bakery will soon have the opportunity to enjoy a second location of the Baker’s Son, anticipated to open later this year in Sugar Land’s Seafood City Supermarket—a chain that opened in December 2023 and caters to the Filipino and Asian communities.

Looking to the future, these chefs say they hope to one day see Filipino food as mainstream as other cuisines widely enjoyed in Houston.

“It gives me goose bumps when I think about it sometimes,” Valerio says. “We’ve had Chinese food, and now Indian food and Greek food, but I think that Filipino food is going to be up there really soon. I think it’s going to be big for our culture.”