The Best Filipino Food in New York, Dish by Dish

Filipino New York has a center, and it is easy to find. Get off the 7 at 69th Street in Woodside and you are standing in Little Manila: the blocks of Roosevelt Avenue in the high 60s where Filipino nurses and their families began settling in the 1970s, where Phil-Am Food Mart has been selling pandesal and longganisa since 1976, and where the corner of 70th Street was co-named Little Manila Avenue in 2022. The trains rattle overhead, and the restaurants underneath have been feeding the neighborhood for decades.

Filipino food rewards ordering by dish. There is the pork — lechon roasted until the skin crackles, lechon kawali fried in slabs, sisig chopped and sizzling on a hot plate. There are the sour and savory stews, sinigang and adobo and peanut-thick kare-kare. There is silog for breakfast, garlic rice and an egg under almost anything, and there are the feasts, kamayan and boodle fights, eaten with your hands off banana leaves. And there is ube, the purple yam, in nearly everything sweet.

The picks below start in Woodside and spread out: to Elmhurst's turo-turo counters, to a social club in Astoria, to Sunnyside's doughnuts, and to a handful of Manhattan rooms — in the East Village, on the Lower East Side and in Chinatown — cooking with real ambition. Go with friends; most of this food is meant to be shared.