Filipino desserts and snacks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2503 Beacon Ave S Beacon Hill
206 / 325-5692 website
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Interview with owner, Ernesto "Ernie" Rios
Ernesto Rios is the co-owner and cook at Inay’s Asian Pacific Cuisine on Beacon Hill. Inay’s is named for a woman who had a lasting impact on Ernie’s life and work: “Inay means ‘mom’.
“My mother is a dressmaker and she has 11 children--but she wants to have twelve. So what she does is do all her dressmaking, and cooking at home for the family. Then when we came to America, she did the same thing: she cooked for eleven children and my dad and herself. In the morning, before everybody goes to work, she’d pack all our lunches.”
Ernie settled Seattle in 1980 and was running his own hair salon when he got a life-changing phone call.
“My mom called me up and said, ‘Can I wash hair in your salon? Because I’m getting tired of watching your nieces and nephews here at the house!’
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| turon fried banana |
"She said, ‘Oh, well, what do you think I can do?’
“But see she’s cooking a lot at the house, and she’s cooking for other people, she’s cooking a lot of sweets at home and delivering it to her friend’s store in Seattle.
“So I said, ‘Why don’t we find you a place to do all your cooking, you know?’
“I found a little hole-in-the-wall and that was the original Inay’s, which is two tables: that’s it! And then it became a very successful business. And then two years later there’s a big spot on the same block that opens up, so I took that and her restaurant became real big, like about sixty people chair instead of eight.”
That success continued, and they had just opened a new branch when Inay passed away in November of 2001.
“We decided to sell that restaurant, and the original restaurant we have on Beacon Hill, we closed that when she died.
“I didn’t do any cooking or anything for 5 years, and then five and a half years ago I opened this one and then I’m a full-time cook.”
Ernie had always thought he hated to cook.
“But I liked to watch her do it, you know. I guess it kind of stuck in my mind, and then when I opened the restaurant I cannot believe I know how to do it. Surprised me. I was surprised: Oh, my God, I know how to do it! And then, I enjoy cooking now.”
He also picked up his mom’s skill at making the sweet treats that are an important part of Filipino cuisine.
“There’s always sweet something: you serve a sweet all the time. So after she’d do the cooking, she will do all the sweets.”
“There’s always sweet something: you serve a sweet all the time. So after she’d do the cooking, she will do all the sweets.”
Inay’s dessert menu features three top-sellers: a caramelized custard called leche flan, an elaborate shaved ice called halo-halo, and a tofu pudding called taho.
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| leche flan custard |
“The flan--leche flan--this is what we eat when we were growing up. Some people baked it, but my mom always steamed it like this, because it retains the moisture of the flan.
“That is our halo halo: we have beans, we have young coconut in there, the jello, the leche flan, either vanilla ice cream, mango ice cream, or the ube ice cream right there--the ube is purple yam. That’s the best dessert that we have here, even in the winter.
“That’s why these three are here, because these are the most...people order them for desserts.”
But Ernie doesn’t just do desserts. Like his mom, he produces and packages more than a dozen other sweet snacks that are sold at shops around town.
Puto are sweet and salty steamed rolls made from rice flour, coconut milk, and cheese. Carioca are skewers of deep-fried rice dough with caramelized brown sugar and coconut. Pichi pichi are balls of steamed cassava root with coconut flakes. Kutsinta are small chewy rice cakes with brown sugar and grated coconut.
“And then guinataan mongo, it’s like a rice pudding with fried mung beans, and then we put coconut milk and sugar: that is guinataan mongo.
“And then also the bilo bilo, it’s a purple pudding, and it has tapioca balls, and then mochiko rice balls, banana, sweet potato, cassava, and taro in it.
“Those are kind of a little bit more on the pudding side, and then the rest of the sweets that my mom made are all like a finger food kind of thing.”
“Like the bibingka malagkit, it’s a mixture of brown sugar and coconut milk, we boil it and then put a little cornstarch to thicken it and then but it over the rice, over the cooked sweet rice.”
Rice-based sweets like this are called “kakanin.”
“Kanin is ‘rice,’ you know; all these kakanin is a sweet derived from rice. Like could be powdered rice, could be real rice, big rice, sweet rice, regular rice...But most of the sweets are made of sweet rice.”
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| palitaw rice cakes |
“All these rice cakes are more the native ones, you know, the older things. But when I was growing up we were eating this also--only when there was a festival, in the town festival. This is something special.
“One other things that we make, they call it palitaw. Palitaw is made of glutinous rice... and coconut milk. That’s all the ingredients. You mix it together and then make a little round ball and then you flatten it a little and then you boil it. And then when it goes up, its called litaw--litaw is ‘to float’, so palitaw mean ‘to float’. So when the glutinous rice and coconut milk float on the water, it means it’s already cooked. So you eat it with grinded sesame seed, or grinded peanut, and sugar.
“That one, people usually cook it during the New Year’s Eve, to welcome the New Year, because they think like they will be free from any problems; you’re going to be floating...”
