Found in translation
Unfamiliar dishes are cheerfully explained to David Burton as he visits Wellington’s first Filipino restaurant.
Food courts and night markets aside, Kubo by Leslie’s is Wellington’s first fully fledged Filipino restaurant. It’s a small 30-seater up Dixon St with multi-coloured industrial stools, an austere concrete floor and fashionably skeletal lampshades. The absence of a liquor licence, the tiny menu and the blackboard of unruly scrawling (not to mention a scraggy old pigeon nestling comfortably underneath the gas stove) might suggest a cosy mom’n’pop affair, yet on the contrary, the repertoire is wildly ambitious.
Dish descriptions are a modern fusion of unfamiliar terms, which may bamboozle outsiders yet appear to deeply enthuse this café’s clientele, drawn almost exclusively from the local Filipino community: on both visits they outnumbered Pākehā by about 27 to three.
The name of the café also had me perplexed. “So what does Leslie’s refer to?” I asked our waitress.
“Leslie’s is a well-known restaurant chain in the Philippines, and its owner is sitting next to you! She’s decided to franchise it out here.”
In moving to Wellington, Leslie’s has gone from traditional Filipino cuisine to an experiment in contemporary Filipino-Korean-European fusion.
The sour broth known as Sinigang is used to make a risotto, for example, while Longganisa (the Filipino version of Spanish chorizo) is converted into the pattie for a hamburger.
Our waitress provided a welcome commentary, explaining that our Kaldereta (braised beef cheeks, tomato, smoked peppers) was being served over pappardelle with parmesan, whereas in the Philippines it would just be rice. It proved pleasant but not mind-blowing.
KFC is droll shorthand for Kubo Fried Chicken, in which chicken bites are coated with house-made Gochujang (Korean chilli, fermented soy bean and malt paste), deep-fried until crisp, then served over a coconut cream and blue cheese “mayo”: weird, but rather wonderful. Accompanying shoestring fries, crisp on the outside, soft in the middle, both looked and tasted house-made, and their chipotle mayo was up with any I have tasted (which by now is about a hundred.)
No complaints either about the Pata Don: boneless pork hock, boiled and then finished in the deep fryer to form all-over crackling. Superb in fact, especially when dipped into the accompanying soy sauce and sensationally fragrant juice of the calamansi lime (a new taste for Wellington).
Seeking something with a broth, my guest ordered the Bulalo (“braised oxtails, corn and beans in broth”). We could see a big steaming bowl in front of a contented Filipino family over the way.
Warmly congratulating us on our choice, our waitress announced that Leslie’s is known for its Bulalo across all four restaurants in the Philippines. Yet “oxtails” seemed a rather polite description for what was now presented – chunky cross-sections cut from the hardworking leg muscles, with enough demonstrable bone, fat layers and tubes of yellow tendon for a complete lesson in dissection.
Perhaps not coincidentally, my guest took one sip of the broth and promptly denounced it as “animally”. From my perspective there was indeed an unidentified unclean note but otherwise the broth had been admirably well reduced and concentrated – and it definitely wasn’t off. So to settle the matter, a tiny bowl was sent back for the chef to assess. Whereupon she appeared tableside and revealed the hidden culprit – a monsoonal showering of fish sauce.
Since nothing thus far had pleased my guest, dessert was in order – Turon – which thankfully brought redemption: a tepee of ethereally toffeecoated fried green banana, a hint of jackfruit, a sprinkling of peanut croquant, a ball of coconut icecream. Very pretty, very tasty and – just to widen Kubo’s global reach still further – very French.