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A slightly chaotic but warm-hearted Filipino street-food joint that doesn’t play by the rules
When BBQ Dreamz scooped £350,000 on BBC Two’s My Million Pound Menu last year, the cash came with the advice that their street food stall’s name suggested nothing of its Filipino flavours and that a name upgrade was sorely needed. “Hold my coat,” they replied – or at least I like to think they did – before settling on Bong Bong’s Manila Kanteen and opening their first bricks-and-mortar site in east London. No one is going to forget that name. Or miss the enormous, American mustard-yellow and neon-pink electric sign in the window of their new Hackney Road premises.
Bong Bong’s Manila Kanteen sounds like a jazz-fusion noise-terror 12-piece who are here to liven up your wedding. In actual fact, for those not au fait with the Filipino political landscape, Bongbong is the nickname of Imelda Marcos’ son, the politician Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Researching the heady life and times of Bongbong – from child star to senator, and on to his latest bid to revise the textbooks and gloss-coat the doings of his dictator father – led me down such a delicious wormhole, I really needed my dinner by the time I scrambled out of the house. Continue reading...