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Food guide

How to find good Filipino food

Filipino cooking is built on sour, salty and fatty in combinations most other cuisines avoid, and it is unapologetic about all three. It is also the largest Asian cuisine in America with the smallest restaurant footprint, which means the good places are frequently in a strip mall with a handwritten sign.

What separates a good one from a bad one

  • Sourness that is actually sour — Vinegar and tamarind do the work here. A sinigang that is not aggressively sour has been softened, and softening is the most common way Filipino food gets adjusted for a general audience.
  • Lechon with crackling that shatters — Whole roast pig. The skin is the whole point and should crack audibly. Soft skin means it was reheated.
  • A turo-turo steam table that turns over — Point-and-choose counters are the everyday format. Full trays at 7pm are good; tired trays at 3pm are not.
  • Rice cooked for the dishes — Garlic fried rice at breakfast, plain steamed otherwise. It is a component, not a side, and good places treat it that way.
  • Kamayan available — The banana-leaf communal feast eaten by hand. A restaurant offering it is confident and usually cooking for Filipino customers, not around them.

What to order

  • Sisig — Chopped pork jowl and ear, griddled, served sizzling with calamansi and chilli. The single best thing to order first.
  • Adobo — Braised in vinegar, soy, garlic and bay. Every family makes it differently and the variation is the point.
  • Sinigang — Sour tamarind soup with pork or shrimp. The most distinctly Filipino thing on the menu.
  • Lechon kawali or lechon belly — Crisp-skinned pork, with liver sauce.
  • Halo-halo — Shaved ice with ube, beans, jelly and leche flan. Chaotic and correct.

Where to find Filipino food

Open listings put 1,229 Filipino restaurants across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.

Cities with the most

Las Vegas, NV 43 Los Angeles, CA 40 New York, NY 29 Chicago, IL 29 Daly City, CA 21 National City, CA 20 San Francisco, CA 17 West Covina, CA 15 Virginia Beach, VA 15 Carson, CA 15 Jersey City, NJ 14 Honolulu, HI 13

Campuses with the most within a mile

NYU 13 The New School 9 Baruch 8 Los Angeles City College 7 HCCC 7 New Jersey City University 6 Hawaii Pacific University 6 UNLV 4 Touro University 4 UTHealth 4

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

How Savor Scout looks for it

Filipino searches read for named dishes rather than the cuisine label, because a lot of Filipino food is sold from counters and bakeries that do not describe themselves as restaurants. Mentions of kamayan, turo-turo or lechon in reviews are strong signals, and they surface places a category filter would miss entirely.

Find Filipino food near you →

Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

When you might want this

Where to eat with a big group Where to take friends visiting from out of town Where to eat when you're celebrating something