Review: Deeply daring and funky, Boonie’s Filipino Restaurant is ready for the spotlight

How long should a critic wait before reviewing a new restaurant?

A decade ago, the standard was two to three months, a practice some publications continue. But the rush to post first has thrown many of those rules to the side.

Boonie’s Filipino Restaurant, the fascinating project in North Center from Joseph Fontelera, provides a great example of the importance of giving restaurants time. It was never bad, but when it opened early this year, Boonie’s didn’t quite live up to my sky-high expectations.

I first encountered Fontelera’s cooking when he operated the Boonie Foods stall at the Revival Food Hall in 2020. The pandemic was still raging, and the homey, rice-heavy Filipino dishes were exactly the kind of comfort I craved. But I was also stunned at the precision of the bagnet, a pork belly dish that somehow had both meltingly tender meat and a crust so ludicrously crisp its crunch reverberated around the food hall with each bite.

Instead of a leap, the brick-and-mortar Boonie’s felt like a tentative inch forward. You could still order the stunning bagnet, but the menu felt meat-centric to a fault. Besides the setting, there didn’t seem to be much that differentiated the project.

So imagine my surprise when I revisited and found that Boonie’s had gotten deeply daring and significantly funkier.

Fontelera admitted that it hasn’t been easy. “Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect when I opened a brick-and-mortar,” Fontelera said. “At the end of the day, not every day is good or bad, but there’s always something to celebrate.”

Start with what’s becoming the restaurant’s signature dish, the sizzling sisig. While you could get a version of the dish at Revival, Fontelera gave it an upgrade by serving it on a screaming hot plate that draws stares from onlookers. That warm plate also has a practical function, as it allows the server to mix in the raw egg at the last second, enrobing the juicy nuggets of pork in a silky and savory sauce.

Everything on the “inihaw,” or grilled bites section, is worth ordering. It helps that the kitchen uses a charcoal-fueled robata grill that infuses each item with a delicate hint of smoke. That flavor is especially noticeable on the talong, a horizontally halved Chinese eggplant that’s grilled until supremely tender, and then rubbed with creamy sunflower butter and a tomato condiment known as burong kamatis. At first, I thought was just a collection of plain cubed tomatoes, but they are lightly fermented, lending a bracing edge to everything it touches.

Even better is the chicken inasal, plump pieces of meat marinated with vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, ginger and calamansi, a citrus fruit popular in the Philippines. “It looks like a key lime, but when you slice it open it’s like an orange,” Fontelera said. “The flavor is like lime, yuzu and orange all in one.”

As the meat cooks over the grill, it’s basted with chicken fat, butter and annatto. That last ingredient, also known as achiote, is the rusty red seed from a shrub native to Central America. (It’s probably best known when ground into a paste with other ingredients and used to season the Yucatán specialty, cochinita pibil.) What’s it doing in a Filipino restaurant?

Ask Fontelera a question like this and he won’t miss a beat before giving a detailed, minutes-long explanation. Honestly, he sounds like he spends his off hours teaching college history. “It has a lot to do with Spanish colonization and the Manila galleon,” Fontelera said. “The trade route connected the Philippines to Mexico and Spain.”

His deep knowledge of the cuisine is best shown off with the daily specials. Count yourself lucky if you get to try dinuguan, a dark black stew thickened with pork blood. Instead of a gloopy and sticky mess, it’s aromatic and sour thanks to the addition of lemon grass and tamarind. Each bite tingled so many of my pleasure receptors that my head felt like it was spinning in place.

It’s OK if you don’t know anything about the dishes before visiting. Fontelera admits that Filipino cuisine is a particularly hard one to fully understand.

“Something I’ve been preaching is that there’s no one way to be Filipino,” Fontelera said. “If it weren’t for the colonization of the Spanish and Americans, it’s likely there wouldn’t be one country. It would have likely been multiple different countries.”

“Take the dinuguan,” Fontelera said. “My version is a drier, northern Filipino style. But order the dish in Manila and it’s a little soupier. Filipino folks will sometimes tell me a dish isn’t authentic, because it’s not like it is back home. So I have to explain that it might not be like where you are from, but it is like where my grandma is from.”

Fontelera’s maternal grandmother grew up in San Nicolas, in the northwestern province of Ilocos Norte, before moving to Manila when she was 17. Starting in the 1970s, his family slowly began moving to Chicago, where he was born. Fontelera said his grandma often looked after him while his mother was working, and he’s been lucky enough to travel back to San Nicolas.

Boonie’s isn’t done progressing. Recently, Fontelera added a lunch menu, available Wednesday to Saturday, where you’ll find many of the heartier dishes the restaurant served at Revival Food Hall. The restaurant is BYOB, though Fontelera is working on getting a liquor license — a notoriously complicated and time-consuming process.

I still wish there were more vegetables. Fontelera pointed out there are multiple vegan or vegetarian dishes on the menu. But often it feels like a choice between eating only vegetables or going all in on the meat. Adding more vegetable-focused dishes would help.

Even with that small gripe, there’s no doubt Boonie’s Filipino Restaurant succeeds because of Fontelera’s passion and deep understanding of Filipino cuisine. “It’s crazy to see that sisig is our No. 1 dish because I didn’t even grow up eating it,” Fontelera said. “Mainstream understanding of Filipino food is still very limited.”

Thanks to his tireless work, and of other local Filipino restaurants like Kasama, it’s never been a better time in Chicago to learn more.

nkindelsperger@chicagotribune.com

Boonie’s Filipino Restaurant

4337 N. Western Ave.

708-990-8886

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booniefoods.com

Tribune rating: 2 1/2 stars, between very good and excellent

Open: Dinner Wednesday to Thursday, 5-9 p.m.; Friday to Saturday, 5-10 p.m. Lunch Wednesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Prices: Starters, $6 to $14; Mains, $26 to $30

Noise: Conversation-friendly

Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible, with bathroom on first floor

Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.