Kamayan in Manhattan

MANILA, Philippines - Consider it another form of hand-to-mouth existence.

One early fall night, at Jeepney, a Filipino gastro pub in New York’s East Village, a party of eight claws their way into a mound piled high with cured meats, dredged red snapper and steamed market vegetables including butternut squash, eggplant and ampalaya (bitter gourd). They rake; they plow, hushed like miners in deep excavation. Until, that is, thumb and four fingers, poised as tongs, close in on a satisfactory pile. Rice, viand and vegetable slide at once across the waxy banana leaf fronds covering the tables and up into ready mouths.

It’s Kamayan Night – in Manhattan. No spoons, forks or plates are allowed – just a hot towel for wiping greasy fingers, plopped by a waiter beside each place setting, next to where a plate would have been.

Held twice a week, Jeepney’s barehanded dinner nights recall boodle fights or mess hall banquets laid out for American soldiers in Philippine military camps during the Philippine-American War at the turn of the 20th century. Just as the GIs ate from a long communal spread in the spirit of camaraderie, Kamayan Night’s patrons are friends who form groups of at least four and comfortably share in a trail of grub that stretches, like a low wall of food, across a 6-foot table. “Wartime” translates to friendly jostling on Wednesday and Thursday, when it’s perfectly normal to see diners reach for the same bulging crab claw, or over each other’s arms for one last grilled prawn brought into focus by a rare halo of light.

Despite the hefty $50 price tag per head, inclusive of rice, two appetizers, three entrees and copious amounts of leftovers, there’s a three-month lead-time for reservations. The restaurant serves an average of 80 people on Kamayan Nights, 70 on Friday and Saturday nights and 50 on slower weeknights. On any given evening, at least half of the diners are Filipino-American; the rest are New Yorkers of different ethnic backgrounds.

High foot traffic on First Avenue and 10th Street in the East Village thrust Jeepney and its Filipino menu into the spotlight, much to the delight of owner Nicole Ponseca. A daughter of Filipino immigrants living in Southern California, Ponseca moved to New York in the early nineties, working as an advertising executive for 12 years and taking on side gigs as waitress, dishwasher, host and bartender by night. She had hoped to observe the industry from the ground up and eventually open an upmarket restaurant, different from the food kitchens that densely populate Queens and appeal mostly to native Filipinos. (The borough now houses 36 percent of Filipinos in New York.)

Her self-paced training coincided with the opening, in Manhattan, of restaurants that served Southeast Asian cuisine, not necessarily from Southeast Asia: from the Michelin-starred sushi spot Nobu to the food critic’s best spilt secret, the Malaysian joint Fatty Crab. It helped, too, that Thai kitchens mushroomed on almost every street corner, and became as ubiquitous as Italian or Japanese in New York.

In 2011, Ponseca, along with Filipino-American partners Enzo Lim and Noel Cruz, and their Dominican chef, Miguel Trinidad, started their first venture: Maharlika, a Filipino bistro in the East Village (home in the 1970s to a now defunct Filipino row of apartments, cafes and even a dance hall) that pioneered the idea of Filipino brunch.

A year later, they opened Jeepney, in homage to the chrome-fitted land shuttles ridden daily by commuters in the Philippines. This is not a family eatery but a trendy joint, as with many restaurants in the East Village. Against this background, Ponseca tweaks native fare for a hip, adventurous audience of Filipino-Americans, Asian-Americans and Americans. For instance, she serves traditional breakfast meats not as part of a rice meal but in the form of sandwiches: Jeepney’s signature “longga dog” serves garlicky longganisa on a hotdog bun, squiggled with a hybrid of mayonnaise and salty bagoong. The popular “chori burger,” on the other hand, upsizes the Filipino’s conservatively sized chorizo into quarter-pounder proportions, pressed between aioli-smeared buns.

The mess hall idea itself came from a Filipino tradition Ponseca observed from her father, who ate with his bare hands, much to a young Ponseca’s dismay. “As a little girl, I would be so ashamed when my friends would come over and he would eat kamayan style in front of them,” she says. “I would beg him not to.” Today, however, she takes pride in the practice, updating her father’s Filipino recipes for Jeepney’s kamayan menu.

Similar hand-to-mouth dining concepts have popped up in other parts of the city, running the gamut of traditional to trendy. There’s Awash on St. Marks Place, an Ethiopian restaurant where diners eat exclusively with their right hands (as is Ethiopian custom), picking up turmeric-spiked vegetables with flatbread rounds the size of dinner plates. In the Meatpacking District, the Copper Room is a bar-within-a-bar that, once every month, serves craft beers with bottomless steak during its Beefsteak Dinners; the only restriction being, diners get neither forks nor knives. Is no-cutlery cuisine here to stay?

“The rise of ‘foodie’ culture in more cosmopolitan cities like New York has also meant that newer food trends have emerged,” says Anita Mannur, professor of Asian-American studies at Ohio University. “One interesting phenomenon is the rise in what we can think of as the mainstreaming to some degree of ‘adventurous’ eating. I think we see this in the appearance of items like balut (duck embryo) on menus,” referring to a Filipino dish also on Jeepney’s roster.

Rey, a returning Filipino customer from Queens, says he comes for the food, which he recognizes as a modernized take on his country’s cuisine. Jonathan, a Filipino living in Manhattan, sees kamayan as a “good date idea, or a fun way to introduce Filipino food to my friends.”

Along other parts of the ethnic spectrum, Kamayan Night also has fans in non-Filipino diners, like Brianna from Hell’s Kitchen who is half Polish, a quarter Italian and a quarter Irish. “I like unusual food experiences and I really like Filipino food,” she says. “I figure it’s pretty cheap for all that you get.”

RJ, an Italian-American New Yorker, was a bit more hesitant. “I’m a little nervous,” he says, holding the hand of his Filipina girlfriend. “I’m the kind of guy who always eats with a napkin.”

Half an hour later, he joins a table of ten, the only non-Filipino date in a particularly rowdy group. RJ ferries food into his mouth, first slowly, and then building up in gusto, equal to his companions. His fingers gleam with oil and sauce. An hour passes. He excuses himself to go to the washroom, and returns after ten minutes with his hands scrubbed clean. “Oh, everything was great,” he says, before pointing a spotless finger toward the ravaged pile of meat and rice on the table. “But I’m still not done!”