Takam tasting menu review, Takam Filipino Food Forward restaurant review, Sydney Filipino restaurants, Filipino food in Sydney

Filipino food is deliciously – and somewhat intimidatingly – diverse. There are fire, smoke and viscous soups, deeply spiced sausages and caramel flans. It’s a cuisine of juicy meats and complex ferments and just about everything else you might expect from a country with a history of Chinese immigration, Mexican trade and Spanish colonisation.

For the past few years, Filipino food has also been touted by Australian food writers – including me – as “the next big thing”. However, because of its huge diversity, with regional dishes across about 2000 inhabited islands, it has traditionally been harder to define and market.

But now a new generation of Filipino chefs is giving it a red-hot go, and leading the pack is the team at Takam.

Filipino isn’t the next big thing; it just might be the food trend of 2023.

The tiny eatery opened on Darlinghurst’s main dining strip in February. It’s a modest space prettied up with yellow craspedias and ceramic vases. Filipino pastry chef Miko Aspiras sells his excellent Don’t Doughnuts treats from the same address, while Takam’s three head chefs – wife-and-husband team Aileen Aguirre and Francis Dela Cruz, and their longtime friend, Lesley Roque – cook a short selection of their home country’s dishes in an open kitchen.

Service starts at 11am, which is a good time to arrive. I made the rookie error of rolling up at 2pm on a Sunday recently and everything was sold out.

Sydney’s Filipino community has taken to Takam with much enthusiasm and tables for the Saturday night-only tasting menu are booked out at least a month in advance.

Kinalas noodle soup ($21) is your go-to for brunch or lunch, featuring a restorative beef broth poured over pork crackling, boiled egg and a frizz of chilli threads; think Filipino ramen and you’re some of the way there. A traditional kinalas would likely include meat picked from a long-simmered cow’s head, but Takam uses a beef rib instead.

Pancit palabok ($24) is another deeply satisfying noodle option, pulsing with the funk of shrimp sauce, tinapa (smoked fish) and fleshy grilled king prawns.

Baked empanadas ($4.50 each) are the size of your palm and chock-full with a creamy chicken and vegetable mix that could also be the filling for a great pot pie. The empanada pastry is lighter than the Argentinian version, but two are still sufficiently filling for a lunch on the go.

Chicken inasal ($18/$33), meanwhile, stars coal-roasted chook thigh marinated in lemongrass and hit with spiced vinegar and calamansi, a sweet-sour citrus that’s essential to so many Filipino dishes. It’s a kaleidoscope of concentrated flavours, accompanied by garlic rice, pickled paw paw and a bay leaf-infused oil made from rendered chicken-skin fat.

If you manage to land a table for the five-course tasting menu ($95 per person), your Saturday night will likely start with a buttery chicken liver spread beneath a snowfall of queso and chives. Perhaps there’ll be a charcoal-grilled ox-tongue skewer, too.

Braised octopus was the highlight when I visited three weekends ago, the tentacles poking out of an inky pool of garlic-heavy adobo, before a main event of terrifically juicy grilled pork glazed with soy sauce and calamansi.

You may also have the chance to add Jervis Bay-farmed mussels ($19) to your order; I can’t recommend doing this enough. Eight chubby bivalves sit on a bed of XO sauce made from tangy, garlicky, longganisa pork sausage, with house-baked bread provided to soak up all the rust-coloured oil.

A single-serve scallop topped with finger lime ($12) is another optional extra for the tasting menu, perched on pureed corn and palapa, a spicy-sweet condiment of toasted coconut, spring onions and ginger.

Aguirre and Dela Cruz tell me that they’d love to move to a larger site in the next year and offer more elevated dishes, such as the scallop and mussels, more nights a week.

They can only accommodate 10 dinner guests at a time, but a Friday evening service to help meet demand is on the cards. A licence to pour wine is also forthcoming. Watch this delicious space.

In further Pinoy adventures, skewer specialist Smoky Cravings has just opened a Parramatta location after finding charcoal-grilled success in Lakemba, Tempe and Ramsgate. Sir Manong serves nourishing adobo braises in Rooty Hill at the same time as ube, a purple-hued yam much loved in the Philippines, is flavouring ice-cream and cheesecakes everywhere.

Filipino isn’t the next big thing; it just might be the food trend of 2023.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine