Bloomberg: A groundbreaking new restaurant ‘Naks‘ opens with food rarely seen in NYC
To open a restaurant anywhere represents a risk, and that goes double in New York’s hypercompetitive market. Double that again when a restaurant serves up a cuisine unfamiliar to said market; and again still, when the tasting menu is priced at $135 per person. But the entrepreneurs behind Naks, the new Filipino fine-dining eatery in New York City’s East Village that open Dec. 5, are on a remarkable winning streak that began with the casual Adda, raised the bar with the boundary pushing Dhamaka and performed a three-peat with Semma, where the menu celebrates the not-seen-enough food of Tamil Nadu. But those restaurants all serve Indian menus. The food of the Philippines is new territory for them.
And at Naks, many of chef Eric Valdez’s dishes require ingredients few restaurants dare to use, much less display on their bill of fare. These include beef blood, bull’s penis and testicles, and most remarkable of all, bovine bile.
Yes, you read that right. Bile, from the gall bladder of cattle, is used in the cuisines of Southeast Asia, where the flavor profile sometimes calls for notes of bitterness. (It is also used in Chinese traditional medicine.) When I asked Valdez to show me some, he brought out a small dish of murky green liquid that smelled slightly pungent, but not enough to make me think of the literal translation of its Naks menu reference, “ki aun” aka soft stool — the literal translation of “ki aun,” the Laotian term for the ingredient.
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