Manila Flavours — Restaurant in Sandwell

I ordered pork adobo, strawberry soda, and ube taro bubble tea on ubereats on deliveroo. The food arrived piping hot despite me being located in the city centre and the restaurant being located in Smethwick. Everything was DELICIOUS. Filipino cuisine has a lot of Spanish influence alongside Chinese and Indian influence due to the history of colonialism and trade. I've become very familar with Spanish cuisine due to me travelling to Lanzarote (Spanish island in the Canarias) nearly every year with family since I was a baby. The adobo reminded me a lot of an Iberian pork dish I had in Lanzarote but minus the hefty price tag of Iberian pork, so the meat used is clearly great quality if it is comparable to Iberian pork. The strawberry soda was also incredible, and made me nostalgic for diabolo fraise, a drink using strawberry syrup and French lemonade that I would frequently drink when on holiday in France (another frequent travel destination of mine, and I was slightly disappointed when I could only find 1 restaurant that served it when I visited Paris for the first time, as I previously had only been to provinces in the north and south of France that commonly served the drink). The ube taro bubble tea was also great, the tapioca pearls were the perfect texture and weren't too firm unlike a couple of bubble tea chains that I've visited before. If you've never had ube before, I can best describe it as being a nutty, vanilla-like flavour. I was first introduced to Filipino cuisine through the show Steven Universe, where a character named Lars was hinted at being Filipino when he baked an ube cake roll in an episode. At the same time I was starting my GCSE Food Preparation and Nutrition coursework, where I chose the prompt of 'based off Asian cuisine' and focused on Filipino cuisine as I was curious about trying the cuisine after seeing it featured in my favourite show of that time. I'm already pretty familar with Filipino cuisine due to this (and I very proudly earned an 8 (grade equivalent to an A) in said GCSE). Filipino food is criminally underrated as in my opinion there's something for everyone. If you enjoy Spanish food, definitely give Filipino food a try as the Spanish influence means that there's a familiarity of flavours, especially garlic and onion. If you're as crazy about garlic as I am (there's no such thing as too much garlic for me!), definitely try the adobo as it's lovely and garlicky (I'll get the garlic rice too next time, I had to make a small sacrifice of getting plain rice last night as I didn't want customers to smell garlic on me at work today as I work somewhere that sells macarons). Super interested to try the other dishes available, such as the kare kare (unsure of if the version here uses offal, but as someone who has tried chicken feet and loved them, a little bit of offal doesn't discourage me). Filipino food also isn't typically spicy, so if you want to really get into an Asian cuisine but you aren't huge on spice (such as myself, I do enjoy spice to the extent of Nando's 'hot' being my limit, but I tend to avoid spicy food as it's one of my GERD triggers), Filipino food is definitely for you! Don't be discouraged from trying Filipino food just because of infamous foods that you've heard of such as balut, as Filipino cuisine is so much...

It wasn’t awful but it wasn’t great. I have an ex who is filipino so I used to eat a lot of Filipino food. However, I’m by no means an expert and I know that the same dishes do vary by region.

I was really excited to try here but unfortunately it was such a disappointment. I tried the chicken adobo, bbq pork and bistek. The bistek was really salty and had no tang from the calamansi. I didn’t enjoy it. The bbq pork was not barbecued, it had none of the smoky slight sweet caramelised flavour that bbq pork is supposed to have. It was stringy and chewy, not charred at all (good bbq pork is like a glowing red colour). The chicken adobo was passable but I’ve definitely had better. The garlic rice was good, the lumpia was poor/average. The filling of the lumpia was just bland mush. Overall the food was so disappointing apart from the garlic rice. I won’t be eating here again sadly, it was really expensive for such average food. I hope more filipino restaurants open up in Birmingham in future so I finally have some good filipino food I can’t make...

The staff were very warm and welcoming. The store itself had a wide range of grocery items to offer and I can finally eat salted duck egg again after over 20 years!

Their hot food was amazing. Unfortunately, I started cutting down on eating meat so I couldn’t eat the chicken adobo but I had the vegetarian chicken teriyaki and it was cooked to perfection. Best chicken alternative I’ve ever had and I started to cut down on meat 3 years ago so I was chuffed to have discovered Manila Flavours.

The gentleman who made conversation with us was especially lovely. The whole staff was friendly. I will definitely come back again and will be ordering takeaway from these guys from now on!

Thank you...