Dish guide · 2026-08-19

Halo Halo: How to Eat the Filipino Dessert

Halo halo means mix mix, and that is an instruction. Shaved ice, milk, sweet beans, jelly and ube, stirred into one glass, in Al Barsha 1, Dubai.

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Halo halo is a Filipino iced dessert built in layers and eaten mixed. Shaved ice goes over sweetened beans, jelly and fruit, evaporated milk goes over the ice, and something purple usually crowns it. The name is the instruction: halo means mix, and saying it twice is the recipe. Thirteen of our Google reviewers name it, which for a dessert on a menu of eighty-odd savoury dishes is a lot.

Mix it before your first spoon

This is the part visitors get wrong. A halo halo arriving at the table looks like something to admire in layers, so people photograph it and then eat down through it one stratum at a time. Do not. Push the spoon to the bottom and turn the whole glass over into itself until the colour is even and the ice has taken the milk. The dessert is designed to be eaten as one mixed thing, and the first spoonful should already taste of everything in it.

What is underneath the ice

• Sweetened beans, usually red kidney or garbanzo, at the very bottom where they soak up the milk.
• Nata de coco and kaong, the chewy cubes and palm fruit that give the glass its texture.
• Sweet plantain or jackfruit, which is where most of the perfume comes from.
• Ube halaya, purple yam jam, spooned on top. It is the colour everyone recognises and the flavour most people cannot name.
• Leche flan or ice cream on the crown, depending on the house. What sits on top is a signature rather than a rule.

The dessert shelf on our menu

Four of these are worth knowing on their own, not only as something buried in a glass. Buko Pandan carries a best seller mark on the printed menu, and prices below come off it live.

When Filipinos actually eat it

At merienda, the afternoon snack hour around three o'clock, and in heat. It is street and mall food in the Philippines rather than a restaurant course, which is why it arrives in a tall glass instead of on a plate and why nobody waits until after a main to order one. In Dubai the summer makes the case on its own: a glass of shaved ice at four in the afternoon is not a dessert, it is air conditioning you can eat.

Getting one home in one piece

• Eat it in. Shaved ice and a twenty minute journey are not friends, and no packing solves that honestly.
• If you do order it out, order it last and eat it first. Delivery runs 11:30 in the morning to 10:30 at night.
• Ube halaya, leche flan and buko pandan all travel properly, so if the table wants dessert delivered, those three are the honest picks.
• Ask for it with less milk if you want the fruit to lead. The kitchen will do it and nobody will think it strange.

Why evaporated milk and not fresh

Evaporated milk is thicker, slightly caramelised from the canning process, and it does not dilute into meltwater the way fresh milk does. It is also the historical answer: canned milk kept in a hot country without reliable refrigeration, so generations of Filipino desserts were built around it and now taste wrong without it. Condensed milk turns up too, usually alongside rather than instead, for sweetness rather than body.

Ube, and why it is suddenly everywhere

Ube is purple yam, and Filipinos have been cooking it into halaya for far longer than the rest of the world has been putting it in lattes. It is boiled, grated, then cooked down slowly with milk and sugar until it is thick enough to hold a spoon upright. The colour is natural. If you have only met ube as a flavour of something else, the jam on its own is the version to try.

The other Filipino ice desserts

• Mais con hielo: sweet corn, ice and milk. The simplest of the family and the one children ask for.
• Saba con hielo: sweetened plantain instead of corn, softer and more perfumed.
• Buko pandan: young coconut strips and pandan jelly in cream, served cold but not iced, and best seller marked on our printed menu.
• Halo halo is the maximal version of all of them, which is why it takes the tall glass and the long spoon.

Halo halo questions we get asked

We are opposite Dubai International Academy in Al Barsha 1, open 8:00 AM to 1:00 AM every day, rated 4.5 on Google. Order one at four in the afternoon and mix it properly.