How to · 2026-08-17

Kamayan Etiquette: Eating Filipino Food by Hand

Kamayan is the Filipino way of eating with your hands. Here is the technique, the table manners that go with it, and where to try it in Al Barsha, Dubai.

Kamayan means by hand. It comes from kamay, the Tagalog word for hand, and it is the oldest way Filipinos eat: no fork, no spoon, rice and ulam pressed together at the fingertips and lifted to the mouth with the thumb. It is a technique, not a free for all, and most people have it by the fourth bite.

The technique, in five steps

• Wash at the table, not in the bathroom. Water and soap reach you before the food does, and everyone sees that they did. This is the part first timers skip and Filipinos never do.
• One hand eats. The right hand handles the food. The left passes plates, holds the glass and stays off the leaf.
• Fingertips, never the palm. Gather a small amount of rice with the tips of four fingers and shape it against the plate. A palm used as a scoop turns rice into a landslide.
• Load the ulam onto the rice, not beside it. Pinch a piece of fish, chicken or vegetable, press it into the mound and close your fingers around the parcel.
• The thumb does the lifting. Bring the bundle up and push it in with the thumb. Done properly your lips never touch your fingers, which is the whole point of the grip.

The four things first timers get wrong

• Going for the meat first. Rice leads every mouthful. The ulam seasons the rice, not the reverse, and the ratio is roughly three parts rice to one part everything else.
• Reaching across a shared table. You eat the stretch of leaf in front of you. Anything further away gets passed to you if you ask.
• Squeezing. A tight fist compacts the rice into paste. The hand stays loose and the food holds itself together.
• Apologising. Nobody at the table is grading your form, and the person next to you is happy you tried.

What to order if you want to practise

Some dishes were built for fingers long before anyone put them on a menu. Fried fish, charcoal chicken, spring rolls and crackling all eat better by hand than with cutlery, and none of them need a shared table to make sense.

The full kamayan table is a boodle fight

Kamayan scales up into the boodle fight, where banana leaves run down the middle of the table, rice is spread the whole length and the seafood goes straight on top. Ours comes in four sizes with unlimited rice and iced lemon tea, and six of our Google reviewers name it in their reviews.

For thirty people or more the same format moves to your venue, and catering starts at AED 49 per head. No pork is served at Pinoy Tambayan, which is worth knowing before you plan a table for a mixed group.

Trying it in Al Barsha

We are opposite Dubai International Academy in Al Barsha 1, and we are open 8:00 AM to 1:00 AM every day, so a kamayan table after a late shift is a normal booking here.

Message us a day ahead for the larger spreads so the kitchen can build the leaves fresh. Bring people who do not mind sitting close together, because that is the other half of eating this way.

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