Ronica Dacula, Gaze Catubey and Martha Cantor met in the New Orleans area but are from the Philippines. Last year, they launched their Piknik Street pop-up to share their favorite Filipino dishes. They’ve served food at festivals from Slidell and the Northshore to New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, where Dacula lives. On Nov. 14-15, they’ll be among the Asian food vendors at the Nola Nite Market festival at the Westwego Farmers Market. For information about the pop-up, visit @piknik.street on Instagram. For information about Nola Nite Market, visit nolanitemarket.com.
Gambit: How did you start your pop-up?
Ronica Dacula: We are three women partnering in the pop-up. We are all here for seven to 10 years, but we spent most of our lives back home in the Philippines. But now we are here with our own families. Our husbands were friends, and we became friends as well.
Usually what we do is we have celebrations within our Filipino community. We celebrate American celebrations with Filipino food, like Thanksgiving and Christmas. We always invite Americans.
We are interested in showcasing our food because New Orleans and the Philippines mirror each other in terms of the food. New Orleans is a melting pot of flavors, and the Philippines are too. We have flavors from our Indigenous people and countries that conquered us, like Spain.
Also, like New Orleans, the Philippines is social. Food is a central element. We are hospitable too. It feels like home here because of the Southern hospitality.
For the past two years, whenever we had celebrations with our Filipino food, we’d invite American friends, and we noticed they showed love for our food. We ended up with lots of empty plates when the party ended.
So we decided to pursue the idea of introducing the food to everyone in New Orleans. We started in our parish when there was an open vendor spot. We grabbed that opportunity.
We are all moms. We all cook at home. But my partners are cooks. They have more traditional tastes in food, and I am the marketing (person). We have different strengths. They do the cooking better than I do.
Gambit: How did people like your food?
Dacula: When it was our first pop-up, we were kind of nervous about how to reach a lot of palettes. Filipino food is not yet there when it comes to being known. So we started with beef wraps and beef toppings on rice. We did some beef crispy wraps too. It did pretty good. We did get some positive reviews.
We just started last July, and from then on, we’d have a food pop-up every month.
In this last October, we did three weekends, mostly in Slidell. We did the Plantmania Expo and Slidell Food and Fun Fest. There’s also an event for the Filipino community in St. Bernard, Fiesta Filipino. It showcased Filipino culture and food. And we went to Sportsfest Car Show and Food Festival in Denham Springs. October was Filipino-American History Month, so that’s why we were out there celebrating our culture.
When we went to the food truck festival last September, we focused on the more popular Filipino food, like the crispy pork and tofu wrap: lumpia, the spring roll of the Philippines.
The pork belly was the most popular thing we did at the festival. It’s juicy on the inside but crunchy on the outside. We serve it with spiced vinegar on the side. That’s pretty popular in the Philippines.
We also started introducing the sweet style spaghetti. We’re going to offer it at the Nola Nite Market too. The sweet style spaghetti — people loved it at the food truck festival. It’s a sweet tomato sauce with hot dogs, ground beef and meatballs. It’s not the typical spaghetti. It has sweeter sauce than the typical Italian herb-y sauce that’s more sour.
Since we’ve done a lot of events, we have categorized our food into three categories. The first one is our classic rice toppings. It’s basically a main dish on top of rice. We eat almost everything with rice. It’s not hard to offer this kind of food in New Orleans, because rice is so popular here.
The thing about a dish like adobo is that it’s a combination of savory, salty, sweet and sour. That’s what makes it unique. Adobo is a slow cooked sauce with a lot of soy sauce, vinegar and garlic. It’s a mixture of different flavors in one dish.
The second (category) is our fiesta favorites. These are the foods we always make during celebrations: the sweet style spaghetti and the lumpia.
The third category is the sweet ones. Our hometown delicacies. The common sweet treats in the Philippines. The first one is the buko pandan. It’s young coconut with a creamy milk base with jellies and pearls. It’s light, sweet and full of tropical flavors.
The last one is the silvanas. It’s a cashew wafer with buttercream and coated with cookie crumbs. I heard someone call it an ice cream cookie. It’s really not because it isn’t ice cream, but it tastes like it.
Gambit: Are you doing anything special for Nola Nite Market?
Dacula: At Nola Nite Market, we’ll offer two of our most popular pork on rice dishes. That’ll be our crackling pork belly and the classic pork adobo.
Our lumpia for Nola Nite Market are different because we are doing a fusion of Filipino and American flavors. It’s crispy pork and tofu, but we are adding remoulade, jalapeños and bacon bits. It’s a meeting of textures and flavors. It’s Filipino flavors as a base with American flavors on top.