Eating it up

“People love going into locals’ homes; it’s a wonderful way to look at the world,” said Traveling Spoon co-founder Aashi Vel, who launched the company nearly six years ago with Steph Lawrence. The pair hatched the plan while getting their MBAs at Berkeley.

Looking back, Vel remembers having an aha moment in Mexico, on a trip she took shortly before starting business school.

“I was in Playa del Carmen and had a hard time finding authentic Mexican cuisine,” she said.

While making her way to a restaurant for yet another helping of gastronomic disappointment, Vel passed by a house. She saw a woman cooking in the kitchen.

“I looked in the window and thought, ‘I want to eat with her and hear stories,’ ” Vel said.

Traveling Spoon has hosts in more than 150 destinations spread over 50-some countries, many of them in Asia. The vast majority of hosts are avid home cooks, not professional chefs. Vel said they’re all put through a stringent vetting process that includes an on-site visit to check conditions and taste the final product.

Almost all of the hosts speak English. The few who don’t use an Englishspeaking friend or family member to translate.

Customers can choose to just have a meal or add a cooking class and a visit to a local market. Price varies depending on location, among other things.

“We have an $18 experience in Bali and a $284 experience in Italy,” Vel said.

Customers book through Traveling Spoon’s website and pay in advance in U.S. dollars. My five-hour mealclass-market visit with Isi cost $68.

Don’t worry about having to share your experience with a bunch of fellow tourists. When you book a host, that host is all yours.

“Our mission is to make meaningful connections over food,” Vel said. “It’s hard to do that with a group of eight to 10 people.”

Isi and I arranged to meet at the Salcedo Saturday Market in the skyscraper-studded Makati neighborhood. The market isn’t far from my hotel, The Peninsula Manila, where I can’t help but brag about booking a room in a fivestar property for $150 a night. Pretty much everything feels like a bargain in Manila.

I get to the market before she does, so I take a few lonely laps around the tented stalls hawking skewers of sizzling meat and piles of exotic fruit, such as bumpy jackfruit as big as a toddler and the notoriously odoriferous durian, with a scent often likened to wet gym socks.

When Isi arrives, we tour the market together, and it’s like my black-and-white movie turns Technicolor. She points to things I missed, and I pepper her with questions. Isi responds with answers and samples.

What’s in those tamales? She shells out a few pesos and hands me one. I peel back the banana leaves to uncover a sticky rice-like filling of minced cassava and coconut.

What’s that yogurtlooking stuff that guy is dishing out of big aluminum buckets? We join the line of customers, and Isi gives me the rundown on taho, a breakfast pudding of sorts, made of silken tofu and topped with brown sugar sauce and sweet pearls of sago palm starch.

We buy our groceries, and Isi drives us to her house, using our time stuck in bumper-tobumper traffic to explain how Filipino cuisine is the OG of fusion food. The flavors and styles pull from a staggering array of disparate cultures and countries, most notably China and Spain. The latter ruled the island nation — named for King Philip II — for more than three centuries.

“The Spanish taught us how to make bread,” said Isi, whose relatives once ran the now-shuttered Betsy’s Cake Center in Chicago and suburban Naperville.

We pull into her gated community, and she gives me a tour of the garden, where we pluck some calamansi citrus to add a blast of acid to the milkfish we’ll have for lunch. Sourness is a hallmark of Filipino food, and that tartness will be a major component in another item on our menu: adobo vegetables.

“Adobo is the unofficial native dish of the Philippines,” Isi said as we went to work in the outdoor kitchen. She combines garlic, vinegar, soy sauce, bay leaf and black peppercorns into this ubiquitous marinade used to cook seafood, and meat as well.

“We pretty much adobo everything,” she said, noting that adobo is both a dish and a technique. The method became a way to keep food from quickly spoiling — a big plus in a tropical climate where refrigeration was scarce.

“You can just leave the dish out because the vinegar preserves it,” Isi said.

Isi invites me inside to eat. As she brings bowl after bowl of food to the family’s dining room table, I take in the surroundings.

Sunlight pours in from tall windows in the highceilinged living room. A sizable collection of shoes neatly stacked under the stairs makes me think of Imelda Marcos. Nearby, a TV monitor shows footage from multiple security cameras positioned outside the house.

Isi says the neighborhood is generally safe; the surveillance system is just a precaution. And it lets her see which neighbors surreptitiously help themselves to her calamansi.

Over a tasty lunch where I do most of the eating, we talk more about food, politics and current events, like the water shortage plaguing this country of 7,500plus islands.

“It’s ironic, right?” Isi said. “The Philippines is surrounded by water, but we don’t have enough.”

I learn Isi has a lot of side hustles. She is a food stylist and photographer and has developed a line of chile products. Traveling Spoon has evolved into her main gig.

Isi gives me a bottle of her pineapple ketchup as a souvenir. She helps me order a GrabCar, the Philippine version of Uber, to take me back to my hotel.

We only spent a few hours together, but I left her house with a better understanding of Filipino food — and life.