Kamayan and the Boodle Fight: Two Histories at One Table

In an Army photograph taken in Luzon on 28 April 2024, Philippine Army Pfc. Fernan Bandong prepares a meal for soldiers training together during Balikatan. Another photograph shows Philippine, American and Australian participants sharing it: cooked meat and rice on a table covered with banana leaves. The accompanying report calls the gathering a boodle fight and describes it as a military version of a kamayan feast. A familiar-looking meal carries two names, each with a different story. Source 6

Kamayan describes eating with the hands. The glossary accompanying Doreen Fernandez’s Culture Ingested includes the familiar possibility of a group eating together, but the definition does not require a military occasion or a spectacular table. That distinction opens a richer history: everyday intimacy, serving vessels, military vocabulary, restaurant work and the choices of Filipinos building communities abroad. Source 1

Hands, dishes and the older shared table

Pedro Chirino’s Relación, published in 1604, describes diners seated low around small round or square tables. Food arrived in several dishes, and people reached into the same dish with their hands. A house could contain many such tables during a feast. This is an early colonial missionary’s account, with the assumptions of that position, but its physical detail is valuable. The shared meal he describes includes plates. Its social scale comes from several groups within a house. Neither feature resembles the single continuous spread that now dominates many photographs of communal Filipino dining. Source 2

Chirino also describes feasts for weddings, visitors, illness and mourning. In accounts of sacrificial meals, a separate plate received small portions reserved in honour of an anito. Food sharing therefore sat within obligations to people and spiritual beings. This detail changes how we read the communal table: the occasion, the placement of food and the portion deliberately set aside could matter as much as the method of eating. Source 2

John Garvan’s early twentieth-century observations, published in The Manóbos of Mindanáo in 1931, reveal another arrangement. He records plates, banana leaves and bark platters, together with washing hands and mouth before and after eating. At large gatherings, insufficient vessels could be supplemented by leaf-lined weaving baskets or leaves spread on a table or floor. In this particular account, serving materials respond to the household’s resources and the number of guests. Leaves belong to a practical repertoire of hospitality. Source 3

Fernandez gives the gesture another dimension. In her essay, eating with hands accompanies the relaxed familiarity of family and intimate friends. Her examples include freshly caught fish and milkfish stuffed with onions and tomatoes, grilled over coals. The attraction is partly the freedom to eat familiar food comfortably in familiar company. Her account helps explain why the practice can be meaningful without a restaurant performance: the hand changes the relationship between diner, food and companions. Source 1

These descriptions invite us to look closely at a meal before naming it. Where does each person sit? Is food shared from dishes, divided on individual plates, or arranged across leaves? Who prepared it, and what occasion brings the guests together? Those questions reveal more than the presence or absence of a fork.

How sweets enter the history of the boodle fight

The surprising object in the naming story is a sweet treat. In October 1941, American Speech published a glossary supplied by the US Army’s Public Relations Division. Its West Point entry identifies boodle with sweets, including cake and ice cream, and describes a boodle fight as a party serving that food. The entry is now transcribed by Virginia Tech’s American Soldier in World War II project. It establishes an American military use of the expression; the definition contains no requirement for banana leaves, grilled seafood or rice. It also cannot, by itself, date the first Filipino use of the name. Source 4

Historians Daniel Bender and Adrian De Leon trace the Philippine boodle fight through connections between American and Philippine military institutions, tourism and restaurants abroad. Their research follows the name across settings and generations. Source 5

Names can travel separately from foods. A borrowed expression may attach itself to an existing way of eating, and acquire different ingredients, rules and associations. That is a more useful question to bring to this history than asking one person to have invented everything visible on the table. The leaf, the hand, the shared food and the name each deserve attention.

What a military meal can mean to its participants

Bender and De Leon’s own interviews make the institutional story personal. At Bella’s Lechon in the Toronto area, server Ava remembered eating together on the final day of Citizen Army Training. Her recollection emphasized companionship. Joy and Joyce’s memories were more ambivalent; even when officers shared food with junior participants, their authority continued. The authors’ discussion captures several interpretations within one restaurant, rather than a single meaning automatically shared by everyone with a Philippine background. Source 5

The 2024 Army account provides a contemporary example of the official ideal. It presents the Balikatan meal as fellowship and equality during a Philippine-led course. Afterwards, the soldiers returned to training. The temporary shared table becomes part of the work of building relationships among forces; the report describes its symbolism rather than measuring a change in military hierarchy. Source 6

A meal can make company feel closer while leaving other relationships intact. Appreciating the hospitality does not require every diner to remember military life in the same way. When someone tells a different story about a familiar meal, that account can add to the conversation at the table.

A restaurant name and the work behind the welcome

The commercial history has its own people and objects. A 2019 Philippine Star feature, built around the recollections of Vicvic Villavicencio’s children, dates the opening of Kamayan restaurant to 1977 and remembers celebrity handprints decorating its walls. The hand became a visible part of a restaurant identity. In the same feature, Cara recalls the children helping to welcome customers, buy supplies at markets, dispatch food and clear tables. Those tasks locate convivial dining in an operating business: someone purchases the ingredients and keeps service moving while guests enjoy the occasion. Source 7

Bender and De Leon’s fieldwork records how Bella’s developed from takeout and lechon catering into a venue with a small dining room. Joy and Joyce promoted boodle fights as part of that move. Here, the feast also helped a migrant business invite customers to stay, occupy a table and make a shared occasion of eating. Source 5

A memorable meal always has a second view, from the kitchen and the clearing station. When we tell food history through diners alone, we can miss the work that allows an apparently effortless gathering to happen. Restaurant stories become more interesting when the welcome and the labour share the page.

Travelling tables and new audiences

Chef Yana Gilbuena took kamayan across the United States through her SALO Project. BOSFilipinos writer Leila Amerling attended the Boston dinner on 1 June 2014 and later interviewed her. Gilbuena described cooking with local produce and finding places to stay and serve meals through personal contacts, Facebook, Craigslist and couch-surfing networks. One host could introduce her to people in the next city. Some meals had no other Filipino participant. The journey made a community through the meal itself, rather than assuming an established community would always be waiting. Source 8

In that 2017 conversation, Gilbuena was also gathering the journey into the planned book No Forks Given: a map, recipes and a memoir. The proposed form placed the route and the people alongside the food. It treated the meal as an encounter with a history worth remembering after the table had been cleared. Source 8

A July 2025 report by Slow Food Hong Kong records another transformation at Brut! in Sai Ying Pun. Filipino chef CJ served a banana-leaf dinner with hamachi kilawin tartare, small tuna steaks with coconut jus, barbecue chicken, garlic rice and an eggplant omelette roll. Ube biko with mango finished the meal; owner Cami arranged optional wine pairings. The menu gives the shared format room for a chef’s own combinations and a particular restaurant’s service. Its identity does not depend on reproducing a soldier’s ration or a single household’s barbecue menu. Source 9

Artist Julius Poncelet Manapul brought the gesture into a different setting in Kamayan na!, part of the Decolonizing Antiquities exhibition shown in 2020–21. Antique plates carried Tagalog phrases formed from rice stained with soy sauce, while utensils were deliberately absent. Manapul connects the installation to remembered family barbecues and to questions of migration, language and colonial dining etiquette. The objects make an argument about belonging: an inherited formal table setting can be rearranged to speak in a Filipino voice. That is the artist’s interpretation expressed through materials, rather than a claim that every family experiences the table identically. Source 11

Some rice-lettered plates ask where the rice is or request the fish sauce. Their everyday table language makes the installation specific. A formal-looking antique object is made to carry a familiar domestic request, so the artwork’s argument can be read in the small business of feeding people as well as in its larger themes. Source 11

What this history offers the host

Cook and writer Vanjo Merano’s own recollection brings the table back to a family outing in Pansol, Laguna. Relatives brought meat and seafood, prepared banana leaves and assembled the food beside a rented pool. His practical menu advice favours food that is easy to pick up: grilled or fried dishes, rice, vegetables and dipping sauces. Watery dishes are harder to manage directly on leaves. This is a useful design observation. The serving surface should help guests enjoy the food; the menu need not become a test of how much can be balanced on a leaf. Source 10

For a gathering of your own, decide what you want people to experience. If the aim is relaxed conversation, allow enough room to sit comfortably and pass food without stretching across another person. Ask about food preferences before planning the menu. Keep plates and cutlery available for anyone who wants them. Guests can participate in the same meal in different ways; the invitation should make that easy.

When introducing the meal, tell the story you actually know. Name the family who taught you, the region of a dish, the cook whose recipe you followed or the occasion you are marking. Leave room for guests’ memories. A thoughtfully hosted table can hold several histories at once, and the conversation can begin with the food already within reach.