Filipino fast-food chains taking off in Toronto

Last month, the company announced it would be opening its first Canadian branch in Toronto in 2015. Dubbed the McDonalds of the Philippines, the chain has 750 branches worldwide, including some in the United States.

Jose Minana, group president for Jollibee Foods Corporation, told the Star its Toronto debut is long overdue. “We should have entered Canada way before,” he says.

There are more than 660,000 Filipinos in Canada, with almost 250,000 located in the GTA, according to data from the 2011 National Household Survey, making Toronto home to the country’s largest Filipino population, followed by Vancouver and Winnipeg.

Although Filipinos are pretty evenly divided between the downtown core and suburbs such as Mississauga and North York, the corner of Wilson Ave. and Bathurst St. is known as Toronto’s Little Manila. It’s home to many Filipino businesses and restaurants.

One of those businesses is FV Foods, where Jorge Lee, who moved to Canada from the Philippines a decade ago, can be found tucking into halo-halo, a rainbow parfait of ice cream, sweet beans, gelatin and shaved ice.

The name means mix-mix in Tagalog, the official language of the Philippines, and that’s exactly what Lee does as he slurps down the sweet dessert.

Located in the South China Sea and colonized by Spain for more than 300 years, the food of the Philippines is a unique mix of Chinese, Hispanic and Polynesian cuisines. One is just as likely to find chicharron-style pork rinds as fried rice.

“It’s hard to brand,” Lee says. “If you ask someone what’s your favourite Filipino food, you know they’ll have difficulty picking.”

Lee says it has been hard to find good Filipino food in the city that reminded him of home. But when Max’s of Manila, known as Max’s Restaurant in the Philippines, opened in Vaughan in 2011, his attitude changed. He liked the restaurant’s clean and friendly atmosphere, familiar menu and reliable service.

When he found out Jollibee was coming to Toronto, Lee says it brought back even more nostalgia for the Philippines.

Eric Parungao, who moved to Canada last year and works with immigrants for the Catholic Community Services of York Region, says Jollibee’s has an “at-home taste” for many expats.

“It’s going to be a real remembrance, a real reminder of what we’ve been missing,” he says.

Max’s, a franchise, has a branch in Toronto and one in Vancouver. Although Jollibee struggled initially in the United States when it first appeared in California in 1998, it has since taken off, with additional branches opening up across the country.

It was even featured on Anthony Bourdain’s newest show, Parts Unknown on CNN in the United States. The famous foodie lamented that Filipino cuisine was “under-represented,” and deemed Jollibee’s take on halo-halo “oddly beautiful.”

Minana says most of Jollibee’s menu has remained unchanged for North American tastes, with a notable exception: its spaghetti, which is sweeter in the Philippines.

“It kind of tastes like ketchup actually, it’s a very distinct taste,” Lee says.

Garth Whyte, president of the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association, says Filipino food is one of the up-and-coming cuisines in Canada.

And Kelly Weikel, a food-trend expert for Chicago consulting firm Technomic, Inc., agrees now is the right time to come to Canada. She recently surveyed Canadians about their eating habits and found that people are getting much more adventurous.

“Consumers want something new, they want new flavours, they want to try an experiment with food,” she says. And pairing the more exotic items, like halo-halo, with comfort food, like burgers and fried chicken, may help people try something new.