THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 9
PHOTOGRAPH BY MIRANDA BARNES FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
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TABLESFORTWO
Jeepney
201 First Ave.
Last December, the restaurateur Ni-
cole Ponseca closed Maharlika, the
first of two East Village restaurants
with which she almost single-handedly
brought Filipino food into the Manhat-
tan mainstream. Maharlika was beloved
for brunch dishes such as eggs Benedict
with Spam and calamansi hollandaise,
but Ponseca, having parted ways with
her longtime executive chef, decided to
streamline her business. It was a fortu-
nate choice; better to have one restaurant
than two during a pandemic. At Jeepney,
her second (and now only) place, she
adapted deftly to outdoor dining, met
an increased demand for takeout, and
then, last month, launched one of the
smartest and most gratifying pandemic
projects I’ve seen: Tita Baby’s Kita Kits.
Every Friday, Jeepney—sometimes
Ponseca herself—will deliver, to Man-
hattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens,
and parts of northern New Jersey (which
has a large Filipino population), enough
food to feed “friends, couples, roommates
or a family for several meals.” Each kit
includes a generous array of mix-and-
match dishes suited to breakfast, lunch,
dinner, dessert, and even meryenda, the
Filipino tradition of a substantial snack
between meals. All are “heat & serve”;
the relatively simple tasks required might
include pouring toasty garlic oil into a
sauté pan set over a low flame and stir-
ring in clumps of precooked jasmine rice,
or sliding a spatchcocked adobo-pula
chicken, redolent of cinnamon and red
miso, into the oven for fifteen minutes
before glazing it in sauce.
The other day, by phone, Ponseca
explained the logistical impetus for the
idea. “You can’t get restaurant-quality
food at home unless it’s cooked à la min-
ute,” she said. “A meal kit enables à la
minute.” The cultural impetus is even
more compelling. A captive audience
means that Ponseca and her Tita Baby
team—a small group of Filipino chefs
with restaurants including Momofuku
Nishi and Oxalis on their résumés—can
take risks she might not have at Jeepney.
“If people are missing their food from a
particular region, I can do foods from that
region that are not easily found,” Pon-
seca told me. “And, if you’re just on a Fil-
ipino food excursion, you get to explore.”
Accompanying each kit is a booklet of
descriptions and instructions (plus menu
suggestions and QR codes for Spotify
playlists) interwoven with historical con-
text, jokes, and anecdotes, written by
Ponseca in a chatty, contagiously enthu-
siastic tone. Eating at home leaves you
with a lot of “cereal-box time,” Ponseca
explained. The list of ingredients in the
gravy for her kaldereta kambing, a goat
stew that she recently offered in tribute
to the Ilocanos, an ethnolinguistic group
that lives mostly on the Philippines’
northwestern seaboard, made my eyes
pop: duck fat, bone marrow, tomato, wild
oregano, liver, goat cheese, patis (Filipino
fish sauce), and olive brine. No wonder
the dish was so beguilingly delicious;
it’s hard to imagine a more enjoyable
example of the influence of both Span-
ish rule and Chinese immigration on
Filipino culture.
Another week, Ponseca reminisced
about a visit to the island of Mindanao,
in the south, whose “flavors and cooking
are arguably the most un-popular kids” in
Filipino food. “On an empty dusty road in
the sweltering heat,” she had come across
a woman carrying a bucket of vegetables
and fresh coconuts, and jumped out of
her car to ask what she was making. To
tinola, a gingery chicken soup ubiqui-
tous in the islands, the woman told her,
she would add young-coconut water and
use ribbons of coconut meat as noodles,
turning it into a Mindanaoan dish called
binakol, thought to have medicinal prop-
erties. The technique “stopped me in my
tracks,” Ponseca wrote. Years later, her
own binakol proved an elixir, indeed. Two
unassuming plastic quarts of cloudy broth,
flecked with beads of fat and fresh Mo-
ringa leaves, bloomed on my stovetop to
become soothingly fragrant, nourishingly
flavorful, and just a little sweet, offering
near-effortless access to a secondhand
nostalgia and making a kind of sense out
of a vexing time. (Meal kits $90-$135.)
—Hannah Goldfield
