What to eat at Naks NYC: Soup No. 5, dinakdakan, puto bumbong cocktail
Photos from Naks
“Filipino food is very commercialized over here. It’s toned down,” head chef Eric Valdez of the newly opened Filipino restaurant Naks in New York said in an interview with the New York Post. “But there’s more than that. That’s what we’re trying to do at Naks—to represent those kind of foods.”
This is why you will not find mainstream Filipino food at Naks. No sisig, no ube, no lumpia. Instead, you will find underrated dishes, ones that Valdez, whose family hails from Ilocos, grew up with, family recipes that have been passed down to him. It also helped that the Naks purveyors went on a culinary trip of the country earlier this year, covering Ilocos Norte, Pampanga, Cebu, Davao, and the streets of Manila.
Valdez, formerly the chef de cuisine at acclaimed NYC Indian restaurant Dhamaka, leads Naks, an a la carte and tasting menu restaurant and bar. It was a hotly anticipated opening that happened in the first week of December.
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Designed by Wid Chapman, Valdez says the interiors feel rustic, with lots of rusted metals and wood used throughout. Photo by Alex Szymczak from Naks
While the look of the restaurant itself is decidedly modern with warm touches of wood, Valdez and the decorated Unapologetic Foods group still imbued it with some Filipino elements. For one, the guests who reserve for the $135 18-course tasting menu are treated to a kamayan-style feast complete with banana leaf-covered tables.
In lieu of beloved and far too familiar Filipino fare, Valdez went with under-the-radar gems. The kamayan is a sit-down tasting menu consisting of 18 dishes: a first bite of sea urchin, followed by kinilaw, a soup course featuring beef-blood soup, appetizers (scallops, chicken skin, and egg noodles among them), mains (vegetable stew and lemongrass-accented lechon), vegetables and rice, and finally dessert.
From the tasting menu: Pinakbet ilokano, lechon liempo, labong, and ampalaya salad. Photo by Paul McDonough from Naks
You will need to pre-book those seats for the kamayan tasting menu and boy, are seats selling fast.
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Lucky for you Naks also has a front section where diners can order from an à la carte menu, where you can order appetizers like singkamas at mangga and ukoy.
On the more filling side of the menu are dinakdakan, which people often confuse with sisig, and the polarizing aphrodisiac and purported hangover cure Soup No. 5.
Dinakdakan. Photo by Paul McDonough from Naks
“There’s a difference between dinakdakan and sisig, which is grilled pork snout and ears and it’s all grilled. With this dish, we’re also going to use pork brains like a binder,” Valdez told Resy. For this pork-centered dish, the pig’s ears and snout are boiled until tender and then grilled before chopping into a mince. It is then slathered with a sauce made out of pork liver and finished off with a dollop of buttery pork brain.
Soup No. 5. Photo by Paul McDonough from Naks
For Soup No. 5, an aromatic soup of beef testicles and pizzle, Valdez deepens the flavor using Sibot spice, which reflects the Chinese influence in Filipino cooking. It consists of four different Chinese herbs: Chinese foxgloves, angelica, peony alba, and goji berries.
“In Manila where I grew up, it’s like more of a hangover soup, or after-drinking soup,” said Valdez. “My friends and I could never find this kind of soup out here in New York, so I thought that maybe if I serve it, people will be excited about it.”
“Chefs are very scared to represent that kind of food,” Valdez told The Post. “But people are loving it, to be honest. It’s a new experience for them. It’s very fun for them because we educate them on how to eat food and the story behind that food.”
And what better way to enjoy a hangover cure than with a preemptive shot of Naks cocktails? Their cocktail program features Filipino liquor like Filipinas Especial spiced rum, Ginebra S. Miguel gin, Emperador red rum, and Archipelago gin. The drinks menu is designed by Valdez’s friend and former classmate Aaron Asombrado. He was previously a head bartender at Dhamaka.
Standouts in Naks’ cocktail menu include a drink inspired by beloved Filipino Christmas time kakanin puto bumbong made with margarine-washed Cazcabel coconut tequila, Probitas white rum, forbidden rice syrup, and Eden cheese.
If you’re looking for a more mellow drinking experience, you can also opt to have the alcohol-free favorites: sago’t gulaman made with Three Spirits Social Elixir and Nightcap, molasses, coconut water, and nata de coco, and taho concoction with Bax Botanics Sea Buckthorn, silken tofu-soya milk emulsion, burnt sugar syrup, and tapioca pearls.
