Toyo Eatery brings Filipino cuisine to Mono
Filipino food is finally getting its day in the sun, and Hong Kong has seen a few new contemporary restaurant openings offering the underrated cuisine. This month, the city is also welcoming chef Jordy Navarra from Toyo Eatery, a renowned restaurant that has been on Asia's 50 Best lists since 2019. Toyo Eatery gets its name from ‘toyo’, the Filipino term for soy sauce, a condiment that is widely used in Filipino cuisine. The restaurant serves a course menu featuring contemporary approaches to Filipino staple dishes like BBQ Silog, ginataan (any dish cooked with coconut milk), and kinilaw (ceviche).
On February 1 and 2, chef Navarra will join forces with Ricardo Chaneton of award-winning restaurant Mono, known for its refined Latin American cuisine, for a special menu collaboration. Sharing the same philosophy and culinary heritage, the two restaurants will present dishes that link Southeast Asia and South America. Filipino cuisine is heavily influenced by Spanish culinary traditions, so ‘the menu is very special to us as we incorporate our memories and roots into it,” says chef Chaneton.
Standout dishes include the crab rice noodle with anato, which uses Spanish and Filipino ingredients inspired by palabok, a Filipino rice noodle dish with a rich pork and shrimp sauce; two kinds of ceviche (kinilaw in Filipino) with amberjack, mackerel, sea urchin and pickled jicama; Imperial langoustine in champorado-inspired sauce with fresh Ecuadorian cacao kimchi; and Brittany monkfish adobo with Bolivian quinoa. For a sweet finish, the kitchen serves flan de leche with saffron and pomelo topped with grated asin tibuok, a rare Filipino artisanal sea salt from Bohol that uses pre-Hispanic method of producing sea salt in burnt coconut husks.