For Filipinos in Sonoma County, new Rohnert Park market offers taste of home

When Armie Rivera opened the doors of Kabayan Filipino Market in Rohnert Park at the end of July, she ushered in a new era of cooking in Sonoma County.

Not only does the store make a taste of home more convenient for the county’s several thousand Filipinos, it also opens the world of Filipino cuisine to people who had the curiosity but perhaps not the commitment to drive to Vallejo or San Francisco to visit a Filipino grocery.

Rivera said her parents were her inspiration.

“Really, it’s just to give convenience to my family first,” she said. “It’s really a hassle to go (to Vallejo) every other week.”

While the other Asian markets in the area carried some items, it wasn’t enough to fulfill the demand of the area’s Filipino community, she said.

Kabayan, which translates to “countryman,” is full of foods and ingredients needed to make authentic dishes.

The store sells more than 30 kinds of vinegar, nearly two dozen types and brands of noodles, fish sauce, shrimp pastes and plenty of ube, the bright purple yam that’s a trendy ingredient right now in desserts from cupcakes to croissants.

“So Filipino culture, we use a lot of vinegars,” Rivera said. “We use a lot of sauces. Everything you cook, it comes with a soy sauce and a vinegar and a lot of garlic. And a lot of onions. And a lot of noodles.”

On a tour of the store, Rivera pointed out a display of seasoning packets, essential for quick weeknight meals such as Filipino Spaghetti, one of her favorites. Her store carries all the necessary ingredients for it (see sidebar).

Before Kabayan opened, a taste of home for local Filipinos required significant time — either in driving or cooking from scratch, or both.

But now, Rivera said, “You don’t have to wait for a special occasion to make it or go driving to Vallejo just to make it. Now you can make it on your regular day.”

It was a quick errand for Yonnie Solidum Rico to pop in to Kabayan and get the noodles she needed to make pancit, a stir-fried rice noodle dish. She’d become used to driving to Vallejo for the ingredients.

Rico has lived in Rohnert Park since moving to the U.S. in 1980 when she was 25. She gave up her job as a clinical scientist and her flourishing basket-manufacturing business to move here from Tablas Island in the Philippines.

“Migrating was really hard. I cried every day because I missed my family,” she said.

The memory of that time still fills her with emotion. As anyone who has moved to a different country knows, leaving family and friends behind is hard. The lack of familiar food can compound the sense of loss.

Although she was successful in business, Rico hadn’t learned to cook.

“I didn’t even know how to cook rice,” she said.

Her mother-in-law and her husband, Efren, she said, taught her to cook, and she was motivated to learn.

“I told my husband, since there’s no Filipino food over here — or else we’re just going to get Burger King or McDonald’s — we have to learn how to cook,” she said. There was no YouTube in the 1980s to teach her how to do it, she noted.

She’s now an accomplished home cook whose traditional Filipino dishes are in demand not only at family functions, but also at community events.

Rico and Efren also run a small resort on Tablas Island where they spend a few months each year. She trains the staff to cook meals the way she likes.

One of her family favorites is a fragrant chicken curry called ginataang na manok, in which she simmers chicken thighs with ginger and garlic in a mildly spicy sauce of coconut milk and coconut vinegar.

“On my island, we have a lot of coconut trees, so we use a lot of coconut milk in our dishes,” she said. Here, she makes the dish here with canned coconut milk. “But in the Philippines, we had to get it from the coconut tree, shred it and squeeze it and get coconut milk.”

Coconut milk figures into one of her favorite desserts, bibingkang malagkit, made with just three ingredients. She combines the coconut milk with cooked glutinous rice and brown sugar to make a lightly sweet rice cake that caramelizes on top and gets crunchy around the edges from the brown sugar.

She also uses coconut vinegar, which is milder than white vinegar, in a dipping sauce for her homemade lumpia.

Rico demonstrated how to fill and roll the lumpia, placing the filling in a zip-close bag with a corner cut off to pipe a thin strip of the pork and water chestnut mixture onto the lumpia wrapper, then rolling it up and sealing it with an egg wash before deep-frying.

Foods like lumpia, pancit and adobo bring the Filipino community together, Rico said.

“(Food) is camaraderie. It’s how you make a lot of friends,” she said. “If you have a party, they’re willing to come to your party because they know there’s Filipino food that you don’t really see most of the time.”

Rivera relishes nurturing that community with the market. At the store, Filipino music plays over the sound system and gets people talking, she said. In a country where more than 100 languages are spoken, it thrills her when she hears one that sounds familiar.

“I didn’t know there are people that actually live here that speak the same language as me,” said Rivera, who is from Pampanga province, northwest of Manila. “I’ve never met anyone that lives in the same province.”

Of course, not everyone visiting Kabayan is Filipino. Plenty of culinary tourists are excited to explore foods and ingredients that are new to them. Rivera and her staff are happy to lend a hand to those who are new to Pinoy kitchen culture.

“We like introducing to other cultures what we have, but we start off with what’s really easy — and we sell them the cookbook,” she said, motioning to a cookbook on a shelf behind the register.

She puts ingredients needed for the most popular dishes close together, like peppercorns and bay leaves in the vinegar aisle, so someone wanting to make adobo doesn’t have to search the whole store.

There’s even an entire section dedicated to ingredients for the Philippines’ unofficial national dessert, halo-halo — things like evaporated milk, fruit jellies and jackfruit in syrup.

It’s been a sweet and busy couple of months since Rivera opened Kabayan, and running the store isn’t her only job. She also works in marketing at Graton Casino. Despite the long days, she said, the feedback she’s getting makes it all worth it.

“I didn’t really think I could open (the store),” she said. “Everyone comes here and they’re just so happy. It makes me feel like, ‘Oh my God, I’m doing the right thing.’”

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Graue at 707-521-5262 or jennifer.graue@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @JenInOz.