Abaca – The Michelin Guide is totally wrong on this Filipino Restaurant

Abaca is a Michelin recommended restaurant located in San Francisco. They focus on Filipino food, and I was so excited to eat at this place because I am Filipino! Here is the menu:

I started with the Ube colada and it was highly disappointing. First, I love everything ube. Ube is a purple yam used in a lot of Filipino desserts. If you have never tried it, I highly recommend you try ube cake or ice cream. Anyway, this drink was unbalanced and did not showcase the ingredient well. It was also very alcohol forward and sweet.

The caviar bites were mediocre. I did not get uni flavors or adobo.

Next, tocino chicken wings. Tocino is usually pork and Filipinos will have it for breakfast so I was excited to see an interpretation of it using wings. It was very average. Not very reminiscent of tocino. Also, tocino is commonly eaten with vinegar. This dish tried to replicate that acidity with pickled mango but it was not well executed.

I also had the lobster and corn broth. THIS DID hit the spot for me but only because it reminded me of a soup mix made by Knorr which my mom used to make which was corn and crab flavor. This tasted exactly like that broth mix. However, if you did not grow up with the mix I am talking about, I am not sure you will enjoy this dish.

Next was the lumpia (spring rolls). They tried to do a spruced up version but I think the traditional is much better. Also, the restaurant used a lot of ingredients not normally found in Filipino cooking but they were not well integrated into the dishes. I will give you specific examples below.

The next dish was thin cut pork skewers. Filipinos are big on BBQ on a stick and this one was done well. The pork was flavorful and resembled the traditional version.

I would say the next dish was a complete fail. There is no such dish in Filipino cooking as a beef salad (in fact, Filipino cooking is lacking fresh salads), and while its not a bad thing to introduce fresh salads, this was more Thai style in terms of taste than Filipino. There were peaches in the dish too, which is totally not used in Filipino cooking.

Next, lechon. This is a staple of Filipino cuisine and this version was poorly executed. The sauce on top was lemongrass, which again, is not used in Filipino cooking.

The final dishes of the night were noodles and sisig fried rice. The rice was probably my favorite thing of the night. It was very savory and well balanced. The noodles, in contrast, were bland.

Overall, this was a disappointing meal. I think that innovating Asian food is a hard task to do well. Unfortunately, this place did not execute well. From the use of ingredients that do not exist in the cuisine, to poor interpretation of traditional dishes, to dishes that don’t even exist, there were only a few things I liked about the place. Needless to say, I would not return nor recommend.