What local dishes should I try in Philippines, and where should I look for them?

Three dishes carry the national argument. Adobo is meat braised in vinegar, soy and garlic, and it exists in dozens of household variants, some with coconut milk, some dry-fried at the end. Sinigang is a sour broth, soured most often with tamarind but also with kamias, green mango or calamansi depending on the province. Kinilaw is raw fish cured in vinegar and often coconut vinegar specifically, with ginger and chili — closer to a Philippine original than to ceviche, and at its best where the fish lands.

Then the map takes over. Bicol, in southeastern Luzon, cooks with coconut milk and chili: Bicol Express and laing, taro leaves simmered until they collapse. Pampanga, north of Manila, is the province most often credited as the country's culinary heartland and gave the national menu sisig, a sizzling plate of chopped pork jowl and ear with calamansi. Ilocos in the far north does bagnet, pork belly fried until the skin shatters, and a vinegar-sharp empanada filled with green papaya and longganisa. Iloilo on Panay has La Paz batchoy, a noodle soup with pork offal and crushed chicharron. Cebu's claim is lechon, whole roast pig. In Palawan, the local dare is tamilok, a woodworm eaten raw from mangrove timber.

Where to look matters as much as what to order. Public markets and the carinderia — small cook-shops serving from trays — are where regional cooking is least adapted, and fiesta days are when households cook the dishes that restaurants skip. Halo-halo, shaved ice layered with beans, jellies, leche flan and ube, is a market-stall dessert rather than a restaurant one.

Grilled fish on a Palawan beach arrives whole and blackened on the outside, split with a spoon, with calamansi and a bowl of soy and chili beside it rather than any sauce cooked into it.

Palawan's reef fish does not come from Tubbataha. Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park, a World Heritage property inscribed in 1993 and extended in 2009, is a no-take marine protected area in the Sulu Sea, closed to fishing entirely. That distinction is worth knowing in a province where seafood is the whole menu: the protected reef is the reason stocks elsewhere in the Sulu Sea hold up, and the fish on the plate came from open fishing grounds.

• Morning — The public market, where kinilaw ingredients and the day's catch set what is worth ordering later.
• Midday — A carinderia, where adobo, sinigang and a vegetable dish are served from trays and the portions are built around rice.
• Evening — Grilled seafood or lechon, which are both occasion foods and usually cooked for a group.

Markets and carinderias run on cash, and the Philippines sets declaration thresholds that matter if you carry a lot of it: local currency above 50,000 pesos must be declared in advance to the central bank, and amounts over 10,000 US dollars must be declared to customs, on entry and exit alike. The dry and wet seasons shape what is on the stalls — PAGASA's rainy season runs June to November — and rough seas in those months thin out the fish counters in island provinces. US citizens get 30 days without a visa, which is a real constraint on a slow, region-by-region eating trip.

For the provinces behind these dishes, the Philippines places-and-experiences question in this group covers the Ilocos and Cordillera north in detail.