Boonie Foods imagines Pinoy food past, present, and future

Former Arami chef Joe Fontelera’s pandemic pop-up settles in at Revival Food Hall.

By MIKE SULA

No, there is no vegan sausage on the menu at Boonie Foods, but I wasn’t the first person to imagine there was.

“Yeah, I get a lot of that,” says Joe Fontelera, the former executive chef at Arami who in early March made his Filipino pandemic popup permanent at Revival Food Hall. The “Vigan longganisa” instead refers to the sausage found around Vigan, the capital city of Ilocos province in the Philippines, where his grandmother was born. Fontelera is hardly the only chef who turned from fine dining to the familiar food of their mothers or grandmothers during the pandemic, and he’s also among the growing number working to subvert the characteristically American stereotype that the food of the archipelago is a monolith.

Take the longganisa at Ukrainian Village’s modern Filipino Kasama, which he maintains is the best in the city right now, and which is more in the style of the sausage from the Pampanga province: bright red from annatto, sweet and garlicky, whereas Vigan longganisa is heavy on black pepper, soy sauce, and the cane vinegar Ilocos is known for.

BOONIE FOODS

Revival Food Hall

125 S. Clark booniefoods.com