Desi Danganan feared diners wouldn’t order any Filipino dishes when he opened his restaurant Poleng Lounge back in 2005. Instead, he built a pan-Asian menu and gradually introduced Filipino dishes as specials.

Oh, how things have changed.

The Bay Area is now in the throes of a Filipino food boom, with contemporary restaurants and pop-ups such as FOB Kitchen, Pinoy Heritage and Likha showing diners a new side of classics like sisig and kare kare.

For the first two weeks of April, SOMA Pilipinas, San Francisco’s official Filipino cultural district, will host a food crawl and pop-up series in an effort to showcase where Filipino food is today and where it’s going, called Kulinary Confidential.

Danganan, the executive director of popular Filipino night market Undiscovered SF, is producing Kulinary Confidential in part as a way to move beyond Undiscovered’s street food format.

“There are chefs doing spectacular things, doing kamayan dinners and modern tasting menus,” he said. “We were missing a big part of the third wave of Filipino food.”

That third wave hails from a young generation of Filipino-American chefs, inspired by their parents and grandparents and experimenting with tradition. Think mac ’n’ cheese lumpia.

Here’s how Kulinary Confidential works: Diners purchase a $48 passport, gaining them access to off-menu specials at a series of restaurants in the Filipino district, which falls between Market and Brannan Streets and Second and 11th Streets. They can redeem multiple dishes in a day or stagger them out across a week. April 1-7 features lechon tacos from Mestiza, pork blood stew with rice cakes from Manila Bowl, pineapple mochi fried chicken from Alchemy and a mystery onigiri from Sarap Shop.

April 8-14 includes chicken escabeche at Alchemy, chicken afritada from JT’s, fried chicken with pandan mochi waffle from Little Skillet and adobo carnitas from Senor Sisig. (These special dishes are only available to people who buy the passport.)

Meanwhile, the event includes six high-end pop-up dinners. They each show a unique point of view, such as Ox & Tiger’s fusion of Filipino and Japanese flavors, Aliwang Lutu’s French spin on a traditional kamayan feast or Sariwa’s focus on the Indian influences on Filipino food.

“As Filipino Americans, our palates and techniques have evolved by being touched by other cultures, so you see Filipino flavors going into new directions that are constantly changing,” Danganan said. “We want to show that evolution.”

About $10,000 in funding comes from the city of San Francisco, according to Danganan, with the goal of making Kulinary Confidential a recurring event highlighting SOMA Pilipinas. The first edition benefits Balboa High School’s Tagalog immersion trip.

“We’re trying to build a Filipino cultural district, one with really strong and resilient restaurants,” Danganan said, mentioning how FOB Kitchen went from San Francisco pop-up to buzzing Oakland brick-and-mortar. “We want to tap into this natural progression by accelerating the growth of these pop-ups.”

Kulinary Confidential: April 1-14; buy passports and pop-up tickets at www.undiscoveredsf.com/kulinary-confidential

Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker