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Comment by spike021 | Hacker News Reader

Jollibee's also has fried chicken with spaghetti! It's a Filipino thing and it's super good. Not sure where they have locations other than California, though.

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Jollibee is expanding in the US anyplace that has a large Filipino population, especially NYC and northern NJ (you already mentioned CA). In the Philippines, spaghetti is more sweet than savory, and often has sliced up hot dogs in the sauce—it is what it is, but I've always preferred the savory Italian-American style with lots of tomatoes, sausage, mushrooms, and peppers in the sauce. Culturally, Filipino spaghetti is more associated with kid's birthday parties (there are a lot of these) than grown up food, but adults love it because of nostalgia.

They have a NYC branch.

I argue that they use entirely too much sugar in their spaghetti. Not that I have some moral outrage about sugar in the stuff, but it was actively very sweet.

Yes, Filipino spaghetti is definitely intended to be sweet--it uses banana ketchup in the sauce. Bananas were used as a substitute for tomatoes due to the Philippines' relative abundance of the former.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_ketchup

Banana ketchup usage for Filipino spaghetti came about during a tomato sauce shortage in the Second World War:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/filipino-cuisine...

There's one close to Port Authority. I tried it once. It was ok, but not so great.

Honestly speaking, when I lived in Midtown West, there was a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place called China Gourmet on 8th and 53rd I think and their plain fried half chicken was amazing. It also was so hot that you could even spice it up at home with some pepper and a squeeze of lemon if you wanted to.

Ah, interesting but makes sense. I _think_ the sweetness level is on purpose but could be wrong. I do remember that from when I've had it though.

The fried chicken is alright, comparable to others but I can't say I was fond of the spaghetti. It clashed with my mind as I wasn't expecting something so sweet... I think even regular ketchup has less sweetness but it was super popular as I am pretty sure almost /every/ table in the place had an order of it.

interesting. in the south we have "chicken'n waffles", it's waffles and syrup served with fried chicken. weird, I know, but it is a very tasty combination.

Chicken and waffles is probably my favorite thing to introduce to someone. They can’t believe it’s a thing before they try it, and after they wonder where it’s been all their life.

It's pretty big in Seattle, too. As another commenter said, the sugar in the pasta sauce is gross though, and entirely an Asian thing.

Northern Virginia I believe.

Definitely some locations in Canada too.

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