No-one’s quite sure how long the adobo guy has been there. The vendors in the tiny Manila alleyway think it’s 40, maybe 50 years.
This morning, as he has every morning, the elderly man with the milky eyes rose early, marinated great slabs of pork in vinegar, soy sauce and bay leaves and slipped them into a hot oven, until the meltingly soft meat glistened in its dark, fragrant duvet.
This is adobo, the nearest the Philippines comes to a national dish. It’s a hot, fatty mess, but taste, not appearance, is king in this cluster of 7000+ islands. You’re never far from a bowl of heaped white rice and adobo here (the standard recipe involves pork or chicken but pretty much anything can be adobo’d – squid, beef, shrimp,…
