Rice & Shine, Wapping Wharf: "You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody"
Why is Filipino food so rare in the UK?
As Roo notes in this review, Filipino food is nowhere near as common in the UK as other cuisines from the same continent. So when we heard Rice and Shine was moving from Bath markets to a permanent spot in Bristol, I wanted to spotlight it — both to share a cuisine with you that you might not get many chances to enjoy and to support a small business doing something different. Roo’s review is ethereal and transportive. I hope you enjoy it ~ Meg.
It’s out there.
Somewhere in the darkness beyond the capabilities of ears and eyes but not beyond the rim of intuition: the Pacific Ocean, or the South China sea to be more precise.
It flows through the clamour of the market, not in body but in spirit, its salt still clinging to the gills of banana fish that flash their silvered skins through chargrill flames. A woman clears a place at a foldout table and gestures that I sit, she brings kopi; a sweet and powerful coffee, thick with condensed milk. Woks flare; orange bursts briefly reflected in the tarpaulin stretched between stalls that act either as sunshades or shelter against sudden downpours from electrical storms. My host places down a plate of rice, rich with the flavour of stock and sharp with the coral heart of sour calamansi, fresh chilli and salt — over which blackened flakes of that banana fish are draped.
This is Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo. This place is the ‘Filipino market’ as it’s known to the locals due to the high concentration of immigrant sellers from the nearby Philippines and the food is both cheap and delicious. Despite the coffee, the warmth of the evening and my many travelled miles wrap around me and I sink further into my plastic chair. If I close my eyes I could sleep and no doubt dream about the constant push and pull of the ocean. It’s the thing that unceasingly penetrates the senses, keeping the market, the sellers and the island moving and what keeps me travelling in the allure of all that is capable in this southeast corner of the world’s largest continent.
Two decades on, that experience remains my closest and only brush with Filipino food. That is, until now. Looking out on the Bristol docks and vacantly imagining that these green mud-slicked trenches where the River Avon and River Frome feed the floating Harbour are in some way the same waterways that connect to the somewhat seven and a half thousand or more islands that make up the archipelagic Philippines, one has to wonder why that is.
Travel anywhere in the UK outside of Earl’s Court’s ‘Little Manilla’ and the gastronomic translation of the entire nation seems to quickly diminish. Why is Filipino food fighting for a place at the table against the more mainstream heavyweights of east and south-east Asian cuisine?
This question simmers as I take a lunchtime table at Rice and Shine, Wapping Wharf’s latest edition which has opened in Cargo One in the spot previously held by the recently departed Daily Noodles. The restaurant, which brightly brands itself in a remodelling of the national flag is, in every sense, Filipino (with Filipino dishes making up over two thirds of the menu), yet labels itself as ‘Asian Fusion’ and spares a few pixels on the menu grid for a couple of riffs that could come from any Japanese or Thai playbook.
But nice as these things are and as well as they may be executed, it’s not somewhere I want to go. It is therefore a shame on ordering the kwek kwek (a Filipino street snack of deep fried quail’s eggs) we’re told they’re not available and have to opt for the citrus edamame (£4.99). Good news however arrives in the only novel drink on the list, a cold can of soursop Guyabano Nectar (£2.99) which is as sweet and thick and tangy as I imagine kefir-whipped custard to be, and serves to be most refreshing. Letdown soon retaliates, though, with the arrival of the edamame, with no hint of citrus and moderate freshness. Quite simply, I’ve had better and here the little green pods feel tired and trite. And it’s this gentle flip-flopping that sets the tone for the rest of the meal as we make our way into the ‘sizzling plates’ main courses.
First comes the lechon kawali (£13.99), a must-try, lechon being the revered national dish and centrepiece of absolutely anything worth celebrating that begs the question: ‘if there’s no lechon, is it really a party?’. Served here alongside a brilliant white hemisphere of rice, the pork belly did all the right things; soft and succulent with that hard-hat of crispy, salty, deep-fried skin.
The sizzling sisig (£12.99) arrived sizzling, an egg yolk gently losing its structural integrity over a jumble of chopped pork, tofu and liver paté. This was it. This is what I had been searching for. Scooping in forkfuls of this I was transported, to where is irrelevant, it was familiar yet new, in its act — it was different.
Lastly came the kaldereta beef stew (£13.99) with flavours of peanut and tomato. This had nothing on its predecessor. Whilst the beef was tender, I felt the stew itself lacked a key ingredient: time.
But gladly switch again we did to finish the meal with the memorable, although slightly bonkers, Halo-Halo, a 12oz cup-ucopia of bounty in the form of ube ice cream, flan, condensed milk, jellied fruits and crushed ice. Meaning mix-mix, the proof is indeed in the pudding. You mix, you eat, you sugar rush. Before doing what I was told, I isolated a spoon of the purple yam ice cream and found it again, a flavour that Starbucks may well make ubiquitous but for now is still unique.
I leave without the full story. Ingredient availability, food education or culinary politics — these are the factors at play as to why a cuisine may not transcend the masses. But I want the lovely people behind Rice and Shine to know that what felt to me as menu padding is unnecessary and, at this riverside venue, they can paddle their own canoe. Or to put it as Maya Angelou did – ‘‘You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody’’.
All words and photos by Roo Winks
Rice and Shine, Unit 7, Cargo 1, BS1 6WP
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