Bradley HohulinIndianapolis Star
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Indianapolis’ Philippine Cultural Community Center staff members occasionally find it tricky to teach Filipino culture to Hoosiers who don't know even one word of the Philippines’ nearly 200 dialects. Fortunately for the Cultural Center, there’s one tongue that nearly everyone around here speaks fluently.
“Food is our love language,” said Cultural Center co-founder Phil Smith, who was born in the Philippines. “Even if (Filipinos) don’t have enough, we’ll make sure you get fed.”
Pork ribs mechado, chicken adobo and crispy spring rolls are a few of the headliners at Yollie’s Kitchen, the newest addition to Indianapolis’ increasingly international culinary tapestry. Operating out of the Cultural Center’s newly opened kitchen at 4141 S. East St. in North Perry, Yollie’s (yo-lees) offers Indianapolis Filipinos a taste of home while introducing outsiders to the cuisine to “teach people through their stomachs,” Smith said.
Smith, 38, was born in Pangasinan, a coastal province in the Philippines’ northernmost major island of Luzon. He was adopted at just two weeks old and grew up on Indy’s east side. Raised by white parents of German and British descent, Smith always found Filipino culture distant and foreign.
The urge to return to the Philippines bubbled over when Smith visited a friend’s house for Thanksgiving during college. Walking down the house’s stairwell, he noticed something in the family's photos.
“Everyone had the exact same nose,” Smith said.
He got to wondering who he was, where he came from, who else had his nose. A few years later, Smith poked around his birth city’s Facebook group and asked if anyone knew the couple whose names were printed on his adoption papers. One group member replied that they lived just down the street. After 21 years away, Smith boarded an 8,000-mile return flight.
In the Philippines, Smith found his birth parents and a community he’d never had before. He lived on the archipelago for a short while in his mid-20s, working various odd jobs. He hosted local college students, cooking for them in exchange for laundry and other chores. In his free time, he hung out on street corners drinking San Miguel Light with his cousins.
When Smith returned to the States, he wanted to recapture that sense of belonging. With the aid of donations and fellow Filipino Hoosier Marife Callender, Smith opened the Cultural Center in December 2020. Since then, the Center has hosted several community events including language classes, live music and weekly food markets. Yollie Olivares, a frequent vendor at the markets, now operates what Smith said is Indy’s first Filipino restaurant.
The menu at Yollie’s reflects the Philippines’ history of indigenous gastronomy shaped by trade and colonization. Where some dishes skew Latin, others would fit right in at a Chinese or Indian restaurant. The result is a culinary hodgepodge with plenty of room for curious eaters to explore.
“In the Philippines, there’s not really a cookbook,” Smith said. “They go by taste.”
Olivares' adobo features chunks of chicken simmered to threads in vinegar, soy sauce and black pepper. It’s a little sweet and more than a little acidic. Cautious diners may treat the whole peppercorns like land mines, but the throat-tickling burst that follows popping them between your teeth is an intriguing counterpart to the fork-tender meat.
Simple, unmuted flavors characterize much of Filipino cuisine. Just as adobo wouldn’t be adobo without some vinegar-induced lip puckering, kare kare sort of tastes like peanut butter stew — probably because it is. Oxtail, beef, tripe (intestine) and vegetables braise in a primarily peanut butter sauce for hours to reach a meaty yet easily chewable consistency. Certainly, the first bite can be jarring to those who normally take their Jif on wheat or white. But those who power through are rewarded with a deeply savory albeit intensely fragrant comfort food.
For a decidedly more Midwestern flavor, you can’t go wrong with kaldereta. This stewed dish gets its name from the Spanish word caldera, meaning cauldron, or in this case a big pot full of beef, vegetables and bell peppers simmered in a mild tomato sauce. It’s a seemingly bottomless pit of umami with a striking resemblance to American pot roast. I didn’t expect to eat anything at Yollie's remotely resembling my deeply Hoosier grandmother’s beef-vegetable soup, but I suppose we truly are more alike than we realize.
The mechado falls pleasantly on the palates of any ribs enthusiast. Spiced tomato and oyster sauce give a slight kick to the pork, which your teeth pull from the bone with the ease of brushing crumbs off a table. For a less carnivorous experience, try the ginataang puso ng saging, a brightly botanical dish featuring banana blossoms in coconut milk. If you enjoy Thai Massaman curry and strong perfumes, you’ll likely savor each spoonful.
The myriad options at Yollie’s can make your head spin, so your best bet is to go with a friend, order whatever looks enticing and dive in. Dinner plates cost $15 and feature two small entrees with steamed white rice and a pair of crackly herb-stuffed chicken dumplings (empanadas may feel like a more familiar term for those unacquainted with Filipino food.)
Despite a handful of unfamiliar flavors, Yollie’s is about as approachable as restaurants come. Diners sit on mismatched chairs in a cozy café-like setting flush with Pacific Island décor. Water is served in crinkly plastic Kroger bottles, while cutlery and napkins arrive sheathed in clear staticky polypropylene.
If, like me, you have the starkly Western European complexion of someone who doesn’t know adobo from the company that makes Photoshop, your server may ask what brought you in. Ideally, you come to explore and learn — and leave with not only a fuller, but much smarter, stomach.
Yollie’s Kitchen (4141 S. East St.) serves lunch Tuesday-Friday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and dinner Friday and Saturday from 5-8 p.m. Follow the Philippine Cultural Community Center on Facebook for information on more restaurants coming to the Center.
Contact dining reporter Bradley Hohulin at bhohulin@indystar.com. You can follow him on Twitter/X @BradleyHohulin.
