Northwestern Dining partners with NU Kaibigan to celebrate Filipino-American History Month NU Dining and Kaibigan celebrate Filipino-American History Month

NU Kaybigan in partnership with Northwestern Dining on On Tuesday, Sargent Dining Hall will celebrate Filipino-American History Month with a full menu of Filipino dishes and traditional desserts.

The special menu included sweets prepared by members of Kaibigan, NU’s Filipino American Student Association, and items from local bakery Umaga Bakehouse.

Caibigan Treasurer Donald Texeria said serving the traditional Filipino dessert “halo-halo” is in keeping with the student organization’s goal of educating students about Philippine culture and also reminds him of home.

Halo halo, a traditional Filipino dessert made with ube ice cream, shaved ice and a jelly topping, is a sweet dessert that Texeria said he enjoyed often as a child.

“I like this dessert, so I will eat it with pleasure,” Texeria said. “I like to give it to other people.”

District Chef Demetrios Kyprianos said the NU Dining team spent a week researching and adapting the dinner menu items to ensure they paid homage to Philippine culture.

To replicate certain dishes, the team sourced ingredients from Chicago and created recipes from scratch, he said.

“There was a lot of research done on this menu,” Kyprianos said. “We wanted to stay as authentic as possible. We also created this recipe, this lumpia, to be very authentic, so we had to bring in special ingredients from local markets here in Chicago.”

Kyprianos said the kitchen team also had to think about how to prepare dishes that could be served “for the masses.”

Sargent was expected to serve about 1,200 students on Tuesday, so he said they needed to think about how to implement some of the recipes on a larger scale.

Weinberg freshman Nezar Shakaki said he tried a wide variety of dishes and desserts for dinner.

Shakaki said he appreciated the opportunity to experience cuisine he hadn’t tried before.

“It tasted very different from the food we usually eat here,” Shakaki said. “I thought it was really good because (it) just brings a different flavor to what I usually eat.”

He said that even though he had never tried Filipino food, the taste of the pork kebabs made him nostalgic for the Arabic food he cooks and enjoys with his family.

“In Arab culture, there’s a lot of meat on skewers, like kebab,” he said. “This grilled meat has a similar concept, just a different meat, and it’s what reminded me of home.”

In addition to the savory dishes, Kaibigan and Umaga Bakery brought dessert. The bakery served pichi pichi, a cassava dessert topped with coconut.

Texeria said hosting the Filipino food and dessert night furthers Caibigan’s mission of bringing Filipino heritage to the forefront of students’ knowledge of Asian American cultures.

“This has been our goal as an organization for as long as I can remember,” Texeria said. “We want to educate people about Filipino culture and food because it’s not as popular as other Asian-American cultures.”

Compass Group Representative Sofia Bamiatsis said NU Dining will continue to partner with student cultural groups to bring authentic dishes to dining halls.

She said she works with students and local businesses to make the menus as diverse and authentic as possible.

“We know that we have a very diverse student population on campus, and we really want to make sure that our programs give our students the opportunity to celebrate and share their culture,” Bamiatzis said. “We want to make sure we do it authentically and honor the culture that we’re celebrating.”

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