Local hospital workers and expats know the best empanadas can be found opposite Kogarah Station.
Every morning, less than two hours after opening, Filipino Fiesta’s bain-marie is chock-a-block full. There’s pork menudo, also known as ginamay, a long-simmered tomato and liver stew. It glistens beside spicy bopis, a mix of minced pig’s lungs and heart speckled with red and green capsicum. Eggplant omelette tortang talong arrives crisp and golden after being flattened with a fork, dipped in egg and pan-fried.
These dishes are delivered in a procession from a kitchen in the back. Next is the Bicol express, a fiery pork stew made with coconut milk and named after a train service between Manila and the Philippines’ Bicol region. It’s placed near the dinuguan, a dark and hearty pork blood and offal stew.
Trays of fresh-baked empanadas appear and are loaded into a warmer near the front door. They’re all gone in an hour, whisked away by customers adding them to shopping-list items found on Filipino Fiesta’s grocery shelves. Meanwhile, lunch requests range from fried tilapia fish to binagoongan, a pork stew thumping with shrimp paste.
Overseeing all of this is owner Cristina Bontjer. After coming to Australia in 1997 from the Iloilo province on Panay Island in the Philippines, she worked as a cleaner and later for food businesses in Allawah and Rockdale. In 2021 she opened Filipino Fiesta in Kogarah, partly because the venue had enough space for a small eating area plus shelves of imported Filipino products, but also because there are several nearby hospitals.
“There are a great many Filipino nurses and [hospital] workers,” says Bontjer. “They come here for food from home that they miss.”
There is no menu at Filipino Fiesta. Customers know the shop well enough to ask for their hot food favourites, usually to take home for dinner, plus the rich steamed custard of leche flan (syrupy Filipino creme caramel). They’re also picking from the window’s display of pan de coco, a shiny sweet bun stuffed with shredded coconut; soft, fluffy and lilac-hued ube cheese pandesal bread; and pianono, the Filipino version of Swiss or jelly roll cake made with buttercream filling.
There’s also triangular slabs of bread pudding and ensaymadas, a brioche-like pastry topped here with grated cheddar. “I’ve worked hard for years and I am very proud that I’m baking my breads here now,” says Bontjer.
Until recently, the next-door shop was her restaurant too, a large space catering to big groups and, most popularly, boodle fights, a traditional communal feast that originated with Filipino soldiers eating together at the end of the day.
For a boodle fight, food is laid across banana leaves and eaten by hand. Filipino Fiesta, named after the food festivals held each month in towns across the Philipines, still offers boodle fights at the long laminated tables in its cafe.
Sitting here is like joining a family as customers greet each other, call out their order to Bontjer and read news from the Philippines on their phones. Between sips of a cup of sweet instant coffee made with condensed milk, I eat the pungent binagoongan, the sweet and salty pork stew’s garlic and pepper flavours soaking into white rice. A chicken and salted egg empanada is comfort food to the hilt, its chewy pastry perfect to drag through a mouth-shockingly hot sauce left behind by the Bicol express.
As the lunch crowd swells, there’s just time to order a super sweet halo halo, the Filipino shaved ice dessert layered in condensed milk, jelly and fruit. (I also nab the last empanada for takeaway as a fresh batch arrives.)
<strong>Three more Filipino cafes to try</strong>
Tita
Between lacy curtains, bright plastic tablecloths and counters of fresh-baked rolls and buns, Tita’s classic Filipino breakfasts are best with icy sweet Manila lattes before licks of ube soft-serve. Fill up with a tapsilog’s sweet-salty beef strips on garlicky rice topped with a fried egg.
4/359 Illawarra Road, Marrickville, instagram.com/tita.carinderia
Taguan
The pull to visit Josemargo Flores and Vincent Baquiran’s inner-city Filipino cafe is most definitely their traditional pork adobo, but there’s also a lot to love about the batch brew and hand-crafted ceramic dog mugs by Filipino artist Bijin.
191 Redfern Street, Redfern, instagram.com/taguancafe.syd
Descanso
Try Descanso’s barkarda (sharing) boards, a smaller version of a boodle fight, with beef tapas, chicken tocino and pork longganisa sausages, or drop in weekends for crispy pork dinuguan, with chilli-rich deep-fried pork sautéed in vinegar and lemongrass.
4/32-72 Alice Street, Newtown, descanso.com.au
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