Several weeks ago, a reader emailed to politely point out that my po’boy roll at Imbibe wasn’t stale, as I’d written in a previous column—it was Leidenheimer bread, an intentionally crunchy bread that the restaurant imports directly from New Orleans.
Sorry, Imbibe! In an attempt to avoid another such mishap, I did some prep work ahead of this week’s venture to Filipino Express, a Filipino restaurant tucked inside an Asian grocery store in Raleigh.
Filipino Express doesn’t have a menu listed online, so I made a list of dishes people frequently name in Yelp reviews—lumpia, pancit, adobo, and kare-kare—and researched them. I also listened to an episode of The Splendid Table about Filipino food and learned about the variety of influences on the cuisine through colonization—Spanish, Chinese, Mexican, and American—and watched a few cooking tutorials, including one on adobo, the national dish of the Philippines…