Filipino Fine Dining in Finland
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The flavors of Pobre (Photo courtesy of Pobre and Paisano)
So, why are the Finns raving about Pobre – a new Filipino restaurant in central Helsinki? Why was this casual dining spot voted one of the top ten new restaurants in 2018 in this city of sophisticated palates and Michelin-starred places?
It’s lunchtime on a Saturday in October. Pobre’s 30 seats are taken, and there’s a waiting list. I had planned to come here for dinner on a weekend but could not get a reservation, so I join the walk-in queue on a weekend afternoon.
Pobre is on the top floor of Kamppi Mall – the largest shopping center in Helsinki. The complex has about 20 restaurants, and Pobre has been drawing more crowds than the modern Chinese, Korean fusion, Tex-Mex, or the Southern U.S. barbeque joints nearby.
Entrance to Pobre (Photo courtesy of Pobre and Paisano)
The place is packed, and I’m the only Filipino-looking customer in the restaurant. Amidst the chatter, one can hear diners pronounce words like sisig, binakol, and ginataan in what I assume would be Scandinavian accents.
The menu has its modern take on familiar Filipino dishes, which changes according to the season. For its Fall line-up, one can choose from whitefish & prawn in coconut sauce, chicken inasal, kare kare, and a dozen other items. I opt for the crispy pork chop in soy caramel sauce, pickled achara and white jasmine rice.
The small restaurant’s tables are close to each other, making it convenient for me to start conversations with nearby customers.
Hannah Degerlund and Maasy Valuoma are nurses living in Helsinki, and get together two or three times a year to catch up on their lives. These lunching ladies have tried a few cuisines in their past meet-ups, but it is their first time to try Filipino. Hannah thinks that the ginataang tofu is not spicy enough, so she adds a tablespoon of Al Morena hot sauce – a restaurant concoction of chili sauce and soy sauce.
At another table, Anika Mäkinen, a lawyer for a telecommunications company, tells me that her favorite is the spiced soy glazed pork ribs. She had been to the restaurant many times before, usually after shopping on a Saturday morning. Today, she is dining alone, shopping bags of H&M and Marimekko resting by her.
Sami & Sonja Paju, young professionals in marketing communications, who live in Espoo, a suburb of Helsinki, have been to Pobre many times. They are having a quick lunch before heading over to a christening party of a friend’s baby. I quip – you’re going to a party, and you’re having a full Filipino lunch beforehand? Won’t they feed you over there? Perhaps a Lutheran christening in Finland is more solemn and does not revolve around food. It’s a staid affair compared with a Filipino binyag.
According to Pobre’s Owner-General Manager Justine Caoibes, 96 percent of Pobre’s customers are Finns. He observes that the Filipino population in Finland is comparatively low, which explains the fewer kababayan customers.
Pobre started back in 2013 as a humble kiosk during Helsinki’s Restaurant Day, a yearly event which features food pop-ups throughout the city. A group of Filipino cooks and chefs who had worked in restaurants across Scandinavia and Baltic cruise ships for more than a decade got together and sold Filipino-inspired items. Their own versions of BBQ pork skewers and steamed buns became hits.
By 2017, the group had gained a strong following on social media, garnering great reviews from local food bloggers. Reservations for their pop-ups were getting hard to come by. It was then that the team realized they were ready to open a more permanent location.
At around this time, Caoibes joined the team, and led them to opening up their first brick-and-mortar in early 2018.
Chef and Co-Owner Paul Tello is in charge of creating the restaurant’s seasonal menus, including their catering menus for special events.
All chefs have trained and worked professionally for more than a decade now, and did time at various restaurants in Manila and Scandinavia. Caoibes came to Finland as a cook nine years ago, while Tello came to the region 11 years ago. Chef Dwight Dumale, the newcomer in the group, has lived in Finland for just a little over two years.
In just a few months after opening, Pobre was voted one of the Best New Restaurants in Helsinki. And that’s saying a lot, in this restaurant-hungry town.
The restaurant has enjoyed great buzz and publicity. Prior to our meeting, Caoibes had already sent me 28 links to online magazine articles and briefs about the restaurant – almost all of them in Finnish. Two Manila-based newspapers covered Pobre last year and gave glowing reviews. And digital articles continue to come as of this writing.
After a year of operating, word got around, and Finns were discovering Pobre’s signature bistek, pansit palabok and whitefish kinunot. The restaurant was always full – for lunch and dinner – with a queue on any given day. The restaurant was getting too small for the demand.
In July 2019, the sister restaurant Paisano made its debut.
Outside Paisano (Photo courtesy of Pobre and Paisano)
Paisano went through months of brainstorming and discussions in the Pobre team. After testing recipes, figuring out price points, recruiting crew, and nabbing some capital, the team decided to put up another Filipino brand. Paisano, located on a fashionable block off the busy and posh Esplanade in downtown Helsinki, is still a casual affair.
On the night I visited Paisano, I am welcomed by the restaurant’s host Eveliina Huttunen, who’s half-Filipino / half-Finn. She greets me with a cheerful “Kumusta ka” in a Finnish accent.
I settle into my seat to peruse the menu. They have a full bar and a basic list of European wines. One can request a cocktail from Vietnamese-Finnish bartender Long Lay Chi -- from the classic martini to infused lambanog. I order their Paisano Calamansi Pale Ale, crafted by a small Helsinki brewery. The brew tastes like a cross between San Mig lite and a hefeweisen.
The pre-dinner drink, a Calamansi Palr Ale IPA, especially crafted for Paisano, with the menu in the foreground. (Photo by Michael Magnaye)
Dumale is Paisano’s head chef and is in charge of the day-to-day kitchen operations. He works with Pobre’s Chef Tello in developing Paisano’s menu, which may include miso kinilaw trout, corn binatog, or a beef hybrid of the French entrecôte and the Filipino pares. With the inventive menu, you know these guys in the kitchen are having fun.
Paisano’s food (Photo courtesy of Pobre and Paisano)
Tonight, I’m trying the whitefish in shrimp emulsion with fermented chili garlic; hand-pulled noodles with chili garlic oil; and the grilled ox tongue. The whitefish was delicate and flavorful, while the ox tongue had a mix of spices that did not try to mask the character of the lengua.
Chef Dumale joins me later to share his views on elevating Filipino cuisine, and how his restaurant follows the Scandinavian ethos of foraging. Foraging is part of Finnish cooking ethos, and the cloudberry is on the national coin. So I ask him whether wild mushrooms, nettles, branches and wild berries might end up in his sinigang.
We talk at length about what authentic Filipino cuisine means. Instead of giving me a lecture on colonial influences and his lola’s cooking, Dumale makes me try his signature dish, without revealing what it is. He makes me sample a plate of what looks like beef jerky – paper-thin slices of raw beef. He makes me guess what it is. After sampling a nice morsel, I immediately reply, “Bistek! Duh!” Thus, he tells me, his bistek is as authentic as what your kusinera would prepare. Regardless of his variation, form and presentation, any self-respecting Filipino will know that his dish is bistek. And that’s what makes it authentic. It doesn’t matter that it’s not your nanay’s recipe. The ultimate gauge of authenticity is to have any Filipino – whether living in Helsinki or Hagonoy – readily identify that it’s bistek.
Over a dessert trio of corn-and-coconut ice drop, calamansi sorbet in a pandan shell, purple yam cake ala mode, Caoibes talks about pride in Filipino cooking, and how it needs to be “thoughtful” and that he’s challenging himself to make the locals crave for Filipino cuisine.
I bid the team good bye, and congratulate them on a very successful run of Pobre and the highly anticipated Paisano.
A gallery of jeepney signs, near the "comfort rooms" -- Lalake and Babae. (Photo by Michael Magnaye)
Caoibes muses, “Filipino food will someday be as popular as any other mainstream cuisine. Its popularity is steadily growing. I think our food rightly deserves a spot to be recognized as a cuisine that has its own unique identity. Filipino food is not just a trend, it’s here to stay and will soon dominate.”
Domination might be ambitious. Then again, in the 1970s nobody outside of Japan would crave for sushi. Today, people all over the world have acquired the taste for wasabi. Someday, Scandinavians, too, will be connoisseurs of bagoong.
Update via email from Pobre/Paisano Co-Owner & General Manager Justine Caoibes on April 20, 2020, regarding his restaurants in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic:
“Finland is not on a full-scale lockdown, but the state has prohibited dining inside restaurants. Pobre and Paisano now offer take away & home deliveries. Luckily, we are getting tremendous support from our loyal customers and it is proving to be the most valuable thing for our survival. We can't wait to welcome back diners inside our restaurants, but until then, it will be us coming to them.”
Ystävällisin terveisin,
Justine Caoibes
Michael Magnaye
Michael Magnaye is the Development Director of Legal Services for Children, an international non-profit organization based in San Francisco, and is in-charge of its philanthropy program. He was born in Davao City and eats durian.
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