Cebu: Port, Trade and the Growth of a Food City

Cebu can be approached through a steaming bowl of rice with pork and shrimp on top, a crisp ngohiong, a parcel of puso or a market full of fish. Each points towards a different part of the city’s working life. Harbour City’s own history, for example, locates its steamed fried rice in Ding How’s kitchen and describes the combination as seasoned fried rice beneath savoury toppings. The dish’s familiarity in the company’s Cebu story comes through a restaurant and its customers, rather than through a single account of an overseas arrival. Source 6

That is the larger story worth following. A port permits movement, but people decide what to unload, distribute, cook, sell and eat again. Between a ship and a lunch are markets, roads, family businesses, specialist workers and habits of service. Cebu’s food identity becomes more interesting when those intermediate stages receive attention. Trade helps explain the opportunities; the city’s cooks and eaters explain what people made of them.

The harbour and its working surroundings

Historian Trizer Mansueto dates Cebu’s formal opening to international trade to 30 June 1860. His archival chapter follows the port’s nineteenth-century development through shipping and navigation records. Camilo de Arana’s 1879 handbook describes a surrounding landscape of fishing, salt production and agriculture, including Mandaue and Opon. It also records changes in anchorage associated with the monsoons. The harbour was therefore embedded in a lived coastal environment: a place of weather, channels, provisioning and work. Opening international trade expanded its connections; it did not create economic life from nothing. Source 1

A historical navigation record is especially valuable because it brings the water back into urban history. From a restaurant chair, the sea can look like scenery. To people moving goods, its conditions determine which places can be approached and how. Salt-making and fishing similarly connect the shore to the kitchen through ordinary materials. These observations establish a commercial and ecological setting, while leaving the origins of individual recipes to evidence specific to those recipes.

The Cebu Port Authority’s description of the port system makes clear that this is still a network rather than one doorway. It identifies international and domestic sections of the base port and five subports: Mandaue, Danao, Santa Fe, Toledo and Argao. That geography is useful when thinking about a food city situated within an archipelago. International connections and inter-island movement are distinct parts of the system. Knowing that distinction prevents an account of Cebu’s cosmopolitan food from overlooking its relationships with other Philippine islands. Source 2

Why a fish city need not catch all its own fish

Anthropologist Romeo Toring’s 2017 study of Pasil and Suba follows fish arriving from nearby Visayan areas and more distant suppliers, including Zamboanga and Palawan. Cargo trucks travelled through roll-on, roll-off links; other supplies arrived from islands by smaller boats. His account distinguishes trading channels and the people coordinating them. The fish market remained central to local identity even as nearby fishing became more difficult. A busy waterfront market, in other words, is not proof that everything on sale was caught immediately offshore. Source 3

This changes what local food can mean. A meal may be local in its preparation, its market relationships and the expectations of its customers while depending on a much wider supply area. The interesting question becomes how those relationships work. Which market receives the catch? Who sorts it and moves it onwards? How does a vendor decide what to cook that day? Such questions restore practical intelligence to a story that can otherwise stop at the vague claim that a port city has good seafood.

The market also feeds its own workers. Toring records roaming sellers offering coffee and rice snacks such as puto, bibingka and bodbod. Fish-drying workers connect Pasil and nearby processing places with dried-fish sales at Taboan. Alongside the movement of a valuable catch, then, are smaller purchases that sustain the people keeping the market in motion. Source 3

Puso: a meal begins before the rice cooks

Puso makes the material work of feeding Cebu unusually visible. The rice is cooked inside a woven coconut-leaf pouch, a form associated with meals including barbecue and lechon. A 2021 study by Marvin Cabasag and colleagues interviewed and observed 18 participants in neighbourhoods including Duljo, Taboan, Santo Niño and San Antonio. Their participants included five weavers, five people who filled the pouches with rice, three cooks, three vendors and two consumers. It is a small qualitative study, but the division of work it records is revealing: the object handed to an eater can contain the labour of several different people. Source 4

The pouch is both a food container and a portion. Its making belongs in the history of the meal rather than being treated as decoration around the main dish. Once that is recognised, eating a piece of grilled meat with puso becomes a meeting between cooking and weaving. It also becomes possible to ask better questions about heritage: who knows the weave, who has time to make it, and whether the people doing that work can continue to earn from it.

The researchers document material judgement within the process: leaf preparation and weaving precede filling, and the amount of rice must suit the size and form of the pouch. Their interviews also record dependence on regular buyers, fluctuating orders and, for some workers, delayed payment. Skill and commercial vulnerability can therefore exist together. Praising the finished object does not tell us whether its maker has dependable earnings. Source 4

Tuslob buwa and the change of setting

Toring’s later study, published in Aghamtao in 2021, examines tuslob buwa through fieldwork and online research. In the Pasil and Suba practices he describes, eaters bought puso and dipped it into a shared, bubbling savoury mixture tended by a hawker. Restaurant versions reorganised the encounter: customers purchased sets and could cook at their own table with their companions. Pork brain was prominent in the dish’s restaurant publicity, but the study directs attention to a broader transformation in setting, payment and participation. Becoming a celebrated Cebuano attraction did not automatically mean that the neighbourhood associated with the food received the gains. Source 5

The change illustrates how a cuisine can evolve without being reducible to an ingredient substitution. Who controls the heat? Who shares the pan? What does the customer pay for? A communal street meal and a restaurant set may carry the same name while offering different social experiences. Neither can be understood well if the neighbourhood appears only as an origin label on a menu. Recognition should allow the people who sustained a food to remain visible in its expanded story.

A family garage becomes a dining place

SunStar’s 2015 reporting on Ho Ngohiong offers a small-scale example of customers helping shape a business. The Bernardo siblings—Francisco, Lance, Patrick and Therese—began with a pushcart outside their home. When customers asked for somewhere to sit, the family garage became an eatery. Their ngohiong used ubod, or heart of palm, in a fried roll; the menu expanded to include other items and puso. At a P. del Rosario outlet, they shifted from the original location’s made-to-order service to prepared food displayed for customers to choose. The report preserves a particular moment in the business’s development, not a current promise about its outlets. Source 7

The instructive detail is the request for a seat. A city’s food landscape can grow through such modest negotiations: a snack becomes a meal, a frontage becomes a place to linger, and a family adjusts its work around returning customers. These changes rarely appear in grand accounts of trade. Yet they explain how a city acquires eating places that feel familiar to residents and how a small product becomes part of a daily route.

The siblings’ menu also experimented with the wrapper itself. SunStar describes a hard-boiled egg enclosed in ngohiong wrapping, alongside familiar grilled and fried accompaniments. Two sauces, one soy-based and one spicy, served the wider selection. The story shows a business building variations around a recognisable form and the tastes customers returned for, rather than relying on a single unchanging product. Source 7

From Colon Street to a wider market

Harbour City’s company chronology places Ding How on Colon Street in 1969, Ding Qua Qua in uptown Cebu in 1988, Harbour City in a mall in 1993 and Dimsum Break in 1996. Read as company testimony, these milestones show a menu moving through different formats and parts of urban life. They need not establish who first brought dim sum to Cebu to demonstrate a consequential local business history. Source 6

Processed fruit provides a different outward connection. Profood traces its beginnings to a home kitchen in 1978. Its company account places its headquarters near Cebu’s seaports and international airport and describes processing sites in Bulacan and Davao as well as Cebu. Dried fruit, purees and other products connect manufacturing with fruit from a wider Philippine geography. The account makes the location of processing and transport part of the business explanation. It also reminds us that food identified with an exporting city need not have been grown entirely within it. Source 8

In the same account, the Cebu plant handles both dried and frozen fruit as well as purees and other products. Different treatments give the same wider fruit economy several commercial forms, connecting a manufacturing kitchen with buyers whose needs differ. Source 8

A food city made through many kinds of creativity

Cebu’s UNESCO Creative Cities membership, dating from 2019, is in Design. The official profile foregrounds creative work such as furniture and crafts. It is useful to keep that designation precise while considering the city’s food: there is ample scope to notice design in a woven container, a service arrangement or a package without claiming UNESCO has designated Cebu a City of Gastronomy. That connection is an interpretation of the food stories, rather than an additional UNESCO award. Source 9

The city’s distinctive meals emerge from repeated acts of transformation. Fish becomes market supply; a leaf becomes a rice pouch; a pushcart becomes a place to sit; a restaurant develops a new service format; fruit becomes something that can enter another market. Cebu’s harbour belongs in this history because it makes connections possible. The food belongs to the people who give those connections a recognisable form, one working day and one meal at a time.