LONDON—There’s a new Filipino restaurant poised to take over the food scene in the United Kingdom’s capital city.
Kinilaw & Buko, an intimate 42-seat restaurant and cocktail bar, opened on the fourth quarter of 2018 at London’s trendy Hoxton Street, with a promise to bring to the table a revolutionary menu that change the way Londoners think about Filipino food.
Cooking up a storm at Kinilaw & Buko is Filipino Head Chef Francis “Ace” Puyat, who was the mastermind of last year’s largest pop-up in London, The Hallou-mi.
Originally from Mindoro, Puyat moved to London with his parents in 1997 and wasted no moment in spreading the word about Filipino cuisine—one plate at a time.
Fast-forward to two decades later, the chef teamed up with his buddy Andrew Zilouf, founder of 100 Hoxton, to transform what was once a tailors’ shop into a Filipino restaurant that masterfully “sews” together the diverse flavors of Southeast Asia’s biggest culinary secret.
Asian fusion art
“FILIPINO cuisine has a lot of influences from neighboring countries and European countries like Spain. There are some dishes that have always been our own, like kinilaw and tinola, [as well as] some that we have made our own, such as kare-kare, adopted from Malaysia. [Then, there’s] lumpia—our take on Chinese spring roll,” said the chef Francis.
“There is a wide range of different people within the Philippines, as well; so added to the melting pot of foreign influences, you also have a beautiful mix of different local cooking traditions. Essentially, Filipino cuisine is the original Asian fusion art. It is a tradition I am very happy to carry on.”
Puyat combines his training in classical French culinary art with his penchant for explosive spices and bold flavors, putting together an eclectic menu revolving around two favorite Filipino culinary elements: kinilaw, the Philippines’s answer to Peru’s ceviche; and buko, a fusion, artisan Filipino ice-cream concept served in a baby coconut shell.
Dynamic and exciting
THE restaurant’s Kinilaw Bar will serve bagoong fisherman’s treat (fermented shrimp, green peppercorns and fried garlic), mustasa-cradled balut (salted duck egg, heirloom tomato, mustard leaf and grated cured yolk), diver hauls’ kapis treasure (hand-dived scallop, cucumber, radish, lime and fermented roe) and baboy bounty (pork belly, dice cucumber, chili and chicharon), which are best downed with a line of crazy cocktails like Kalamansipation (gin, kalamansi lime falernum and fennel) and Pinoy Island Coffee (coffee, Pusser’s navy rum, Gran Marnier and condensed milk).
Buko, on the other hand, offers tempting treats such as red-bean butterscotch bomb (red-bean ice cream, miso butterscotch sauce and ginger Anzac biscuit), pop star (lychee ice cream and sumac popping candy) and pig out (lechon condensed- milk ice cream, sea salt and black pepper caramel popcorn).
“Kinilaw & Buko is a fine addition to the growing number of Filipino food establishments in the UK,” Ambassador of the Philippines Antonio M. Lagdameo said. “What makes the Filipino food movement in the UK unique is that today’s generation of Filipino and Filipino-British chefs are not afraid to reinvent Filipino cuisine. This is what keeps our culinary tradition dynamic and exciting.”
DFA