If you've been on food TikTok or Instagram lately, you've probably seen it: ube everything. Ube lattes, ube pancakes, ube cheesecake, ube ice cream. Purple food is photogenic, so it spreads. But there's something bigger happening beneath the surface — Filipino cuisine is having a genuine moment in the United States, and it's not just about the sweet stuff.
I spent the last two weeks eating at eight different Filipino restaurants across Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Some were trendy hotspots with hour-long waits. Others were humble family spots that have been open for decades. I wanted to understand what's real and what's just hype. Here's what I found.
The Ube Problem: Good for Instagram, Bad for Understanding
Let's get this out of the way: ube is delicious. It's a purple yam with a mild, nutty sweetness and a vibrant color that looks amazing on camera. But treating ube as the face of Filipino food is like treating pumpkin spice as the face of American cuisine. It's a single ingredient, not a cuisine.
The problem is that most Americans discover Filipino food through ube, then expect all Filipino food to be sweet and Instagrammable. They go to a real restaurant and order adobo — a savory, vinegar-based braised meat dish — and get confused when it's not purple.
The best restaurants I visited understand this. They have ube dishes, but they also have proper kare-kare, sinigang, and dinuguan. They don't let ube define them.
The Rise of "New Filipino" Cuisine
There's a wave of young Filipino-American chefs doing something interesting: they're taking traditional dishes and modernizing them without losing the soul. At Lasa in Los Angeles, I had a chicken inasal that was smoked over bamboo charcoal, served with a calamansi glaze that was both familiar and unexpected. It was clearly Filipino. But it was also clearly contemporary.
Same story at FOB in San Francisco, where they serve a sisig fried rice that's topped with a soft egg and crispy pork bits. It's the kind of dish that makes you stop talking because you're too busy chewing and enjoying it.
The key is that these chefs aren't trying to be "elevated" in the pretentious way. They're not deconstructing lumpia or serving adobo in a test tube. They're just cooking Filipino food with better technique and better ingredients. It's refreshing.
The Chain Restaurant That's Actually Good: Jollibee's Expansion
Jollibee, the Filipino fast-food giant, has been expanding aggressively in the US. They now have over 80 locations nationwide, and they're opening new ones at a rate of about one per month. I went to the flagship location in New York's Times Square, and the line was out the door.
Here's the thing: Jollibee is genuinely good. Not "good for fast food." Actually good. The chickenjoy — their fried chicken — is some of the best fast-food chicken I've had. The skin is crackling crisp, the meat is juicy, and the gravy is addictive. Their spaghetti is sweet and meaty, completely different from Italian versions but delicious in its own way.
I also tried their new ube pie, which is a seasonal item. It's a deep-fried turnover filled with ube jam. It's messy, sweet, and absolutely worth the hype. But it's a dessert, not a meal. Don't let it fool you into thinking this is all they do.