- Okay, here we have adobo sugpo.
Whole prawns covered in black garlic.
- [Francesca] Okay, thank you.
- [McGraw] Oh my god.
- Yo!
Bad Saint first opened in DC's Columbia Heights
neighborhood in 2015.
The restaurant's namesake was inspired by the first
Filipino settlement in the United States,
Saint Malo, Louisiana.
And that inspiration speaks to their food.
It reflects the owners' experiences as Americans,
and allows them to honor their Filipino roots
by highlighting lesser known regional dishes.
Bad Saint doesn't take reservations,
so each night, hopeful diners begin lining up
as early as 2:30 in the afternoon,
and wait until the restaurant begins service at 5:30p.m.
I'm with my new friend Don.
He's the first person in line today.
How does that feel?
- Oh man, it feels great.
We got here around 2:30p.m., 2:45p.m.
- You seem prepared, have you done this before?
- At least about 100 times.
Most of the time I do it for friends,
and sometimes I do it for myself.
I have people come from London, Yugoslavia,
the Middle East.
How familiar are you with Filipino food?
Before eating at Bad Saint.
- Oh not at all.
I had the noodles with mushrooms.
It was a spicy dish.
I'm not really a noodles guy,
and I don't like mushrooms.
The way that they sauteed the mushrooms
almost tasted like it was meat.
I think that was a vegetarian meal.
It was really awesome.
- Cool, thank you so much for talking to me.
- No problem.
I mean, we'll keep talking 'cause we're in this line.
I mean, for me, I think Bad Saint was the first time
I heard people lining up for Filipino food,
and I thought that was a really big deal
and I was like, "What, that's crazy."
How did the concept of Bad Saint come to be?
- What you experience as Bad Saint is really
sort of an amalgam of chef's vision and love for
Filipino food and his interest in really highlighting
regional cuisine, but also highlighting his own
personal experiences with Filipino food.
- It's very intimate,
and that's one of the first things you notice.
How many seats do you have here?
- [Genevieve] 24.
- 24?
- Even though it's so tiny, and even though
a restaurant of this size might not have appeal
to somebody else, but I think what we took away
from it when we first saw it was that it felt really homey.
We wanted to convey that sense of that special
Filipino brand of hospitality.
- Yeah, I really relate to going to someone's house,
and you have to clarify, "Wait, are we related or not?"
'Cause you're not sure and it feels like home.
- We really thought very carefully about, like,
how do you translate the warmth and the generosity
of being hosted in someone's home to a restaurant setting?
On any given evening, at least half the dining room
has literally never had a bite of Filipino food
in their lives.
To be feeding people, some people, their first bites
of Filipino food, I feel like it's such an honor
and a privilege.
So we try to make it
as demystifying and approachable as possible.
(people chattering)
Right now it looks like I won't have anything for two
until about 8:45, 9:15p.m.
- Genevieve just started seating people
and it's already pretty packed,
and there's still people lining up
and people waiting to hear the times
that they're gonna sit down.
(upbeat string instruments)
- [Genevieve] Right here.
31 open.
(pan scraping)
- Okay, so next up.
This is the piniritong alimasag.
So these are soft shell crabs.
They're Chesapeake Bay blue crabs.
The sauce that they're in is a spicy crab fat sauce
with lime and cilantro.
In different dishes you see traces of chef's history.
This is definitely a dish from a Maryland kid,
but not just crabs, like soft shell crabs.
Half the city goes insane when it's soft shell crab season.
- The crab fat for me was a breakthrough.
When I went to the Philippines last year,
I had no idea that it was a delicacy
from my dad's hometown.
- Yeah, I didn't know that either.
So you had it in the Philippines
and then did you automatically know that you wanted
to start using soft shell crab?
How did you come up with this?
'Cause I think it's a really good representation
of you.
- Well, you know, soft shell crabs are seasonal
around this time, and being from Maryland,
I love crabs.
I eat it every year,
so I wanted to do something besides crab cakes,
which everyone does in the city, I think.
I told myself I need to find a way to make this
back at home.
I want to show the whole world that this is what
regional Filipino food is.
- I mean, if you don't like soft shell crabs,
can we be friends?
No, no.
Do you go to the Philippines a lot as a kid?
- No, I did not.
Last year was my first time going.
Yeah, it was a mind-blowing experience.
- That's crazy.
- I've never been on a 20 hour flight.
As soon as you get off that plane,
there's Filipinos everywhere.
I remember just going to a roadside area
and just eating food, eating lechon, or eating tilapia,
with calamansi, the fact that you're learning
their way of life.
I was born in Olongapo City.
I've never been to Bacolod,
never been to Cebu, never been to Pampanga.
I've always wanted to know what kind of food
they were cooking,
and my mom was my chef,
so she trained me in the Filipino palate.
That's my go-to when I'm looking for new recipes.
- Alright, here we have adobo sugpo,
whole prawns covered in black garlic.
- Um, I'm sharing this meal with my crew
because I like to keep them fed.
This is McGraw and Scotty, which you already saw.
Since you guys had to watch me eat,
you get to watch McGraw eat.
You have those for breakfast?
- Oh my god.
That's amazing.
Can I feed you?
- [Scotty] No.
- [Francesca] Oh, please.
- Do not.
- [Francesca] Yeah.
You guys, this restaurant is all about family.
- That was good though.
- The shell's good.
I don't mind eating the shell at all.
- [Francesca] Oh yeah, you could also eat the shell.
- This is braised chicken with coconut, turmeric,
ginger, and chilis.
- [Francesca] What is the most important ingredient
to this dish?
- I think it's the palapa.
The palapa is this native condiment that they use
in Maranao cooking.
It's just toasted coconuts with a lot of chilis.
The Mindanao palapa has sakurab,
which is their native garlic,
and here we have spring garlic
which is in season right now, actually.
So we use that.
I think the palapa is what makes it very Maranao,
and also using a lot of turmeric, lemongrass,
which you will find a lot in the south.
It's so close to Malaysia and Indonesia.
- [Francesca] And the chilis too.
I think spicy food isn't as common.
- [Tom] The Thai chiles that we get here
is our version of the labuyo chiles
you find back at home.
(gentle pulsing)
(soft piano)
- This is the piaparan na manok.
Manok in Tagalog means chicken.
This is kinda like a curry.
So I'm gonna get a lot of sauce.
And this is really spicy actually.
Did you always know that you wanted to cook Filipino food?
- I did not know that.
- Did it just kinda happen?
- I kinda gave up on culinary school.
I was learning more working at restaurants.
That's pretty much how I got my start.
It was my mom that actually introduced me to this food
four years ago.
She just wrote some recipes for me
and was like, "Hey, I have a recipe for kare kare dinuguan
"and I'm passing it down to you."
So for me it just was like wow.
It's a big deal,
'cause my mom is the head cook of our family.
- Hearing that, what challenges do you meet
continuing to push yourself with these dishes?
- Well, most challenging myself,
and Genevieve also helps me challenge myself.
She's always pushing me to make a vegetarian dish
that's Filipino, and it's got to be Filipino.
It's gotta have ingredients, it's gotta be somewhere
regional, it's gotta have a Filipino name.
The radish dish, the labanos,
with burnt coconut crema, pistachio.
I was watching videos on the internet,
watching people from Maranao burning coconuts
on the streets.
They would just blend it,
and then they would use it as a marinade
for the chicken, lamb,
and it would just give off
this really dark, soup looking nilaga, beef nilaga.
And I thought that was pretty awesome,
'cause I've never seen anything like that before.
So we tried it here, and it's amazing.
The color is of the burnt coconut
with the cream, and then pistachios,
the texture is sweet, sort of earth, chocolatey.
It's vegetarian.
It's awesome.
(gentle harp and flute)
- Holy (beep).
One thing I notice about Bad Saint's food
is that there's a flavor there that is very familiar,
even though the dish doesn't look like something
I remember or something that I know.
When you hear that people are lining up for Filipino food,
how does that make you feel?
(Tom laughs)
- It makes me feel...
I'm sure my mom would be proud of me.
It's all because of her.
She passed away four years ago before the restaurant opened,
and if she would have seen this today,
she'd be so, so proud of me.
I want Filipino food to always be the best version
of itself.
We've only scratched the surface here.