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Unlike Portland, where you could easily spend two hours of your morning waiting for a plate of duck confit hash and bananas foster French toast, Seattle isn’t much of a line town. But every weekend, scores of hungry brunchers queue up around the corner of 2nd Ave and Stewart for Filipino-American diner food at Ludi’s. The menu boasts a long list of silog (garlic fried rice, fried egg and a protein) and American breakfast classics like omelets and biscuits and gravy, but nearly every table is crowned with a stack of ube pancakes, topped with a shiny, electric-purple coconut ube sauce and finished with a squirt of whipped cream and an edible flower.
I sit down with the heartbeat of Ludi’s, the ever-smiling co-owner Greg Rosas, and his daughter, Rita Glenister, to learn the long, interesting history of the popular downtown Seattle restaurant.
This episode is a celebration of ube, the humble tuber that’s been a part of the Filipino diet for hundreds of years. The root vegetable is beloved for the vivid, Instagrammable violet hue it adds to desserts, in the form of ube jam, syrup or extract. But what does an actual ube look and taste like?
We head to Seattle’s Chinatown International District to visit Hood Famous, the first Filipino food business to open in the neighborhood in more than 30 years. Hood Famous makes all kinds of purple desserts, from co-owner Chera Amlag’s incredible ube cheesecake that started it all, to ube cookies, lattes and pastries filled with the housemade ube halaya Chera grew up eating in the Philippines. Her husband, co-owner Geo Quibuyen, tracked down a raw ube (apparently they’re difficult to find in Seattle!) and boiled it up so we could share a taste.
