Filipino Bar Bites & Friends — February 2026

Pulutan is the Filipino word for food you eat while drinking, and Pulutan! Filipino Bar Bites, Appetizers and Street Food by Marvin Gapultos is a whole book of it. Everything is built to arrive in waves and get picked at while people talk over each other, which is a fair description of what we were going for in February.

Michael’s grilled pork belly skewers came glazed with coffee and ginger beer, a combination that sounded gimmicky until you tasted it. Beyond that: chicken fried eggplant, quail eggs deep fried in corn dog batter, a red tub of garlic vinegar peanuts under a heap of cilantro, pineapple wrapped in pastry, calamari with a lemon wedge and a bowl of sauce. Almost everything on the counter was fried and somehow it never felt heavy, because you were only ever taking two of a thing before moving on to the next.

Plates kept appearing, nothing arrived on a schedule, and the evening ran well past when we thought it would end. It made for one of our loudest tables.

February is a hard month in Toronto. A warm, noisy room full of fried food was a good answer to it.

We run one of these every month. Subscribers get the link before spots open to everyone.