A Filipino fine dining star rises downtown

Neither of my Filipino grandmothers would look at the dish in front of me and identify it as lumpia, the fried spring rolls typically filled with ground pork, shrimp, or vegetables. 

Two delicate wafers sit on a white ceramic pedestal, each adorned with half a dozen squares of opaline jicama and pear, a minuscule green leaf perched in the corner of every tile. These “lumpia” look almost too fragile to lift off the plate. But the flavors and textures are not delicate — they are vivid, with bright splashes of pickled jackfruit, banana miso, and Japanese pear. 

Dining at 3-month-old Restaurant Naides is not about seeing classic Filipino dishes run through a fine-dining translator. The line from inspiration to outcome is less direct. 

Though chef Patrick Gabon grew up in the Philippines, and his understanding of the nation’s culture and flavors underpins every dish, the menu is mostly a reflection of his life’s journey and what he has learned along the way. From his years cooking in top San Francisco restaurants, he adopted California cuisine’s obsession with local and seasonal ingredients. During his time in New Nordic-inspired kitchens, he embraced pickling, fermenting, foraging, and curing — and recognized the parallels between the cuisine that Noma made famous and the food from his home country. 

At Restaurant Naides, with the help of a lean six-person team that includes his business and romantic partner, Celine Wuu, he combines it all to offer a meal unlike anything else in the city.

“I’m a good follower, but at the same time, I always have it in the back of my head that I will do it differently,” Gabon says. “That’s how I approach things. I want to be different, but I have my foundations. It’s not just all being different for the sake of being different.”

Patrick Gabon and Celine Wuu.

The meal starts with a flight of opening bites that spotlight Filipino street snacks, including the lumpia, fritters called okoy, and puto, a steamed rice cake that arrives crowned with pork rillettes wrapped in a thin sheet of slippery, luscious lardo. 

But Gabon’s confluence of inspirations is most apparent in his version of kinilaw, a raw fish dish similar to ceviche, which at Restaurant Naides is elegantly restrained, almost buoyant in its lightness. The traditional dish can be bracingly acidic with fruit-forward notes, but Gabon swaps coconut milk for a combination of yogurt and fermented coconut water, which is brightened by oil made from pine needles the couple forage in Tahoe. At the center, under blush-colored petals of cured trout, he hides a mound of trout tartare made from trims (an effort to reduce waste without sacrificing style) and pickled spruce.

The sinigang course has become a signature. The humble soup can be divisive thanks to an assertive, sour profile that’s boosted by the saltiness of fish sauce and fatty hunks of pork. Gabon instead puts briny abalone at its heart. “For me, it was just something I really like eating,” he says, “and it’s meaty enough to be able to hold up to the broth.” 

To add creaminess to a rich, dry-aged beef broth spiked with tamarind, he offers an earthy yam-leaf emulsion. In place of hunks of tomatoes and onions and a fistful of leafy greens, a mosaic of tender water spinach stems is arrayed atop slices of sea snail, each placed so precisely that the dish looks almost like a close-up of a tropical bird’s feather, eye-catching and utterly delicious. 

A generous bread course sees warm, housemade pandesal slathered with a mousse of chicken gizzard and liver, topped with crispy bits of chicken feet. Then come the final savory bites, both featuring dry-aged duck. First is thick slices of succulent breast in an adobo-inspired marinade made from soy, garlic, bay leaves, and vinegar. Next is a riff on tusok tusok, the Filipino street food served on bamboo sticks. Gabon forgoes the skewers, but the pair of bites — one a meatball made from leg meat and the other a petite cut from the thigh — are a memorably unctuous finale. 

Anyone who finds themselves praising desserts for being “not too sweet” will enjoy the three final courses, which spotlight distinctly Filipino ingredients: pili nuts, rice, and calamansi. There’s nothing to complain about when it comes to the toasted rice ice cream served with a warm cup of fermented rice milk or a tart calamansi brulee. But the most memorable will be the first dessert: a buttery tart filled with persimmon and buried under a flurry of shaved pili nut, which are rare, expensive, and native to the Philippines. 

There can be no doubt that Gabon and Wuu pay attention to the details, right down to the paper on which they print their menus, made at the Mission’s Shotwell Paper Mill from the kitchen’s leftover pineapple leaves. Wuu, who oversees the beverage program, deftly pairs each tart, savory, and sweet course with wines from both the old and new worlds. 

But the more interesting option is the nonalcoholic pairing, for which she has made six beverages, often putting the would-be waste from the kitchen back into use. For one, tangy, fermented kiwi is balanced with celery and pungent galangal; for another, tomato water leans on woodsy guava leaf, raspberry, and sage. Each layered sip is utterly beguiling. 

Gabon, 34, and Wuu, 28, have worked at top San Francisco restaurants. She was at Benu; he was at Sons & Daughters before spending a year at Milka, a two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Slovenia. They had already purchased their return flights to the States in June 2024 when they learned that Sons & Daughters was moving to a new space in the Mission, leaving its Bush Street location available. Though they hadn’t planned to open a restaurant so quickly, it felt like fate, and within a few weeks, they’d secured it — and financed it using seed money they earned from an early crypto investment. They kept the space almost exactly the same, even retaining the tables, chairs, and art. As a result, Restaurant Naides feels a little like a teenage boy wearing his father’s jacket; there’s still plenty of room to grow and make the space their own. 

Like many of restaurant owners, Gabon and Wuu are as thoughtful about the food as they are about the people behind it. “We think about this project as not just our project,” Wuu says. “Everyone on the team has something to get out of it, so we’re not just working for ourselves.” At a recent team dinner at Filipino-Japanese restaurant Ox + Tiger, they asked every employee to share their two- and five-year plans, so they could manifest them into reality. Gabon says he has already manifested what he dreamed of two years ago, when he was working at Sons & Daughters: cooking his own food one day. 

At $205 per person for the tasting menu and $145 for a wine pairing or $110 for the nonalcoholic option, dinner for two at Restaurant Naides will set you back nearly $1,000 with tax and gratuity. It’s steep for a restaurant that has yet to earn the accolades that typically accompany such a price tag. But if Gabon and Wuu set their minds to it, maybe they can manifest those, too.