February 3, 2025
MANILA – It’s a typical Tuesday at the EDSA MRT and LRT interchange. Dotting the walkway are the semi-legal vendors hawking the usual ephemera: knockoffs of popular toys, grooming and kikay kits, the occasional snake oil potion. But something catches my eye: A stall (really just a monobloc table with a tarpaulin) selling chicken biryani packed in hard plastic containers.
I chat with the lady manning the stall: She’s married to an Indian man and they take turns selling biryani here and also online via Facebook. A tub of her biryani sells for P100 (roughly $1.80), roughly the same price as a meat-and-rice dish in most working-class eateries around Metro Manila.
She shares that daily, her offline stocks run out by noon. I ask her why she thinks biryani has caught on with Filipinos.
“It’s OFW (overseas Filipino worker) relatives bringing the food back home, exposing their families to biryani. I think the spiciness and flavoring of biryani clicks well with Filipino tastebuds, too,” she smiles in a mix of English and Filipino.
A ‘new’ rice dish for a nation in love with rice dishes
Depending on who you ask, biryani either originated from South Asia or the former Persian territories in the Middle East. Even its cooking methods vary. Nonetheless, the dish has become one of the iconic offerings of the greater Middle Eastern and South Asian region.
Common threads include the use of chicken or lamb on flavored basmati long grain rice in ghee (clarified butter), with the most basic herbs being cloves, cardamom, and cinnamon, often pre-roasted. Fresh herbs and garnishes commonly used are coriander, mint, and lemon rinds.
Selling affordable, pang-masa biryani is a peculiarity that seems to have replicated in the usual liminal spaces taken for granted as we go to and from work, school, and home.
“Biryanis! Biryanis! Biryanis!” I hear through the din of a packed mall food court in Cubao, Quezon City.
Thanks to numerous Indian characters from Holly- and Bollywood films, I could tell from the seller’s voice that his biryanis were legit and would taste fire.
And lo and behold, it was a Pakistani man also selling complementary dishes like samosas and lassi. The experience was so novel, I couldn’t help but order the full set, and I wasn’t disappointed. I expected a “tinipid” version with small portions and less herbs and spices but it seems our Pakistani friend stuck to his roots.
Weeks later, along a crowded alleyway (it’s actually a two-lane street, but the parked cars have transformed it for better or worse) leading to the tricycle terminal in a low-income Marikina neighborhood, I chance upon a tapsilogan, par for the course in such corners of the metro.
This time around, however, aside from the usual suspects—mami, tapsi, pares—I see biryani on the menu. There are solo, sharing, and party platter options, and diners can choose between chicken or lamb. Prices start at P150 ($2.30) but can shoot for as high as P1,200 ($20).
The nanay who runs this joint with her relatives shares that she learned the recipe working for 15 years in Dubai. Her trays always sell out. She believes it’s because it tastes similar to what OFWs know and love, all for a fraction of the price relative to high-end restaurants.
I order a solo meal of chicken biryani: It checks the boxes—cardamom aroma, clove kick, ghee base, coriander, and lemon garnishes. The rice-to-meat ratio leans heavily towards rice. “It’s basmati,” Nanay notes in mixed English and Filipino, “imported from India. Want a Coke to wash it down with?”
How can I say no?
Manila isn’t the most walkable of metropolises but surprisingly, walking can sometimes be faster than driving, especially when you factor in the EDSA Bus Carousel and what train lines we have.
It’s safe to bet that all of the above biryani sellers know their target market: Low-income commuters on foot looking for a quick, tasty, and filling bite to tide over traffic woes.
Take it slow
In contrast to the rushed nature of eateries catering to commuters, there are also biryani restaurants where one is meant to stop, sit, and savor the dishes.
These joints catering mostly to middle- and upper-middle class customers have also gained more traction. It’s true that institutions like Hossein’s and Swagat in Makati have long held the fort for Arab and Indian cuisine respectively especially for discerning diners, but a new crop of restaurants has sprouted for a younger generation eager to expand their palates.
Two restaurants east of Manila are notable.
Liza Fielder of The Clay Oven in Marikina Heights likes to wear her eyeliner smoky, with defined contours, inspired by Indian and Arab makeup styles.
Fielder, one of the pioneering alumni of the College of Saint Benilde’s culinary arts program, reveals that batches of biryani are prepared hours in advance, the night before, to marinate the meat in rosewater-based brine, to refine the ghee, and to properly roast the herbs, sticking true to what she learned working as a chef in the Burj Al Arab in Dubai.
The Clay Oven, a joint venture with her sister that opened mid-2024, also serves Arab cuisine alongside Indian fare. They chose Marikina Heights to keep prices affordable without compromising on quality. Majority of their ingredients, the spices in particular, such as garam masala, cinnamon sticks, Kashmiri chili, are imported as these don’t grow in the Philippines.
When she was new, she trained under Indian chefs in Dubai who assigned her tasks like roasting the day’s herbs. She clarifies that in contrast to Southeast Asian cuisine with its heavy preference for fresh herbs, Indian spicing prefers to use roasted herbs. The only adjustment she had to make for Filipinos was “toning down the spice level by a lot. Everything else, I kept as is.”
Fielder recommends pairing her biryani with their home blend chai latte and baklava, which leans more on nutty rather than sweet, bursting with layers of crushed pistachios.
In Antipolo (with a branch in Pasig), Maroush Maher opened at the height of the COVID pandemic in August 2020 when the owner, a long-time OFW worker, lost his previous job. They rode the peak of online orders before building a brick-and-mortar restaurant.
Even before the lockdowns, Maroush Maher’s founder was long looking for a restaurant “that matched the flavors remembered from Dubai and Kuwait.”
When the restaurant first opened, it was mainly serving the more Filipino-familiar shawarma. Biryani was only later added to the menu.
Maroush Maher’s Pasig branch manager, who prefers to remain anonymous, expounds over a messaging app: “We are proud to serve authentic biryani. While some may hold differing opinions, there are misunderstandings about biryani. Filipinos often believe biryani should be spicy and intensely flavored. However, there are various types of biryani, and ours is the Arabic style, which differs from the Indian style. Arabic cuisine emphasizes aromatic spices, resulting in dishes that are fragrant rather than strongly flavored.”
Make it mine
The challenge in transplanting international cuisine into a new culture lies in balancing traditional flavors with local preferences: Spiciness, bitterness, sweetness, sourness, the knobs here need to be adjusted and this normally sparks debate on whether a dish is “authentic” or not.
Nonetheless, a balance can be struck, and from here, culture not only cross-pollinates and evolves but heritage is also respected. And Filipinos are no stranger to indigenized cuisine, from our versions of starchy Chinese egg noodle dishes to Iberian paellas and stews well into our spin on American fast food.
It seems biryani, which originated from Indian and Arabic cultures, is taking the same route in Las Islas Filipinas, thanks in large part to migrant Filipino workers returning home.
It seems Filipino cooks across social classes strive as much as possible to stick to biryani’s core principles, importing key ingredients like basmati rice and roasted herbs as needed.
“Our profit margins aren’t much,” the lady at the MRT-LRT exchange says in Taglish, “but at least our recipe is authentic!”