Philippines

Manila

Sorbetes is made with coconut or carabao milk and sold as dirty ice cream. What has the world been missing?

Manila is where sorbetes comes from: ice cream built on coconut milk or carabao milk and thickened with cassava flour rather than cow's cream, hand-churned in salted ice, and sold from painted wooden carts nicknamed "dirty ice cream" for the street it travels on, not the product (Simpol.ph, 2025). The tradition is old enough that it was served at General Emilio Aguinaldo's 1898 presidential inauguration banquet, a few decades after the American trading firm Russell & Sturgis first shipped ice into the then-Spanish colony in 1847 (Simpol.ph). Escolta Street, in the Binondo district, held the Philippines' first ice cream parlor, Clarke's, at the foot of the Bridge of Spain around 1900, with a competing soda fountain later inside the Botica Boie drugstore nearby (Positively Filipino). Inside the University of Santo Tomas compound in Sampaloc, a sorbetes cart grew into Mang Tomas Pinoy Sorbetes, a shop still selling coconut- and carabao-milk sorbetes today. Ube, the purple yam sorbetes made famous, is now driving what analysts call a global "ingredients revolution" in ice cream, lattes and pastry, with Philippine export value climbing even as domestic production falls short of demand (Inquirer Business, 2026) — though the people most visibly treated as its serious craft exponents currently work outside Manila's own city limits.

Manila is under research for The Gelato Cities Index 2027. A city guide publishes when the research supports a case and its selected spots each carry verified evidence — not before.

Know a Manila spot that belongs? Tell us →

Last checked 2026-08-21

City boundary

The City of Manila. Quezon City, Makati and the rest of Metro Manila are separate cities.