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First Look: Acclaimed Darlinghurst restaurant Takam opens a new cafe with leche flan lattes, fluffy brioche bread and a brekkie roll unlike anywhere else.
The team behind Darlinghurst restaurant Takam opened Adhika on a quiet, tree-lined street in Rushcutters Bay on Wednesday, bringing the bright colours and bold flavours of Filipino brunch fare to Sydney’s inner-east.
It’s a small, sunlit cafe with checkered floors, vintage chairs and hand-built shelves filled with family trinkets. There’s an old gasoline lamp, a clock and some books – each object inherited from a mother or grandmother, cultural touchstones of life in the Philippines.
Co-owner Aileen Aguirre says they wanted Adhika to remind customers of walking into the home of a beloved family member, taking a seat and “knowing you’re gonna be fed some really good food”.
Head chef and co-owner Francis dela Cruz draws upon Filipino flavours (spicy sambal, sour kalamansi, sweet banana, to name only a few) and custom-ordered breads from Doonside’s Starlight Bakery (a finalist in Good Food’s Essential Sydney Cafes & Bakeries Guide) to elevate cafe classics.
“Adhika [gives us] a platform to share Filipino foods in a way the Sydney community can relate to,” Aguirre says. “It’s a fun take on breakfast staples.”
Fried eggs are served with chilli Mindanao sambal, smoked pork longganisa sausage, herbed cream cheese and bicho (fried dough). There’s cheesy avocado toast remixed with toasted slices of ensaymada (Filipino brioche) and shavings of salted egg yolk. And the piece de la resistance is a brekkie roll on thick, buttery pandesal bread, stacked with American cheese, runny egg yolks, barbecue sauce and slices of hamon bulakenya – a three-day process, marinating and cooking Byron Bay pork neck in pineapple juice, brown sugar and beer.
“The word ‘adhika’ in Tagalog … is all about having a vision or purpose, and our vision for Adhika is to celebrate our Filipino heritage and for Sydneysiders to become familiar with those flavours,” dela Cruz says.
That’s a big part of the reason the team decided to open in Rushcutters Bay, says Aguirre: “It’s crazy how the number of Filipino restaurants have grown in Sydney [since opening Takam in 2023] and we’ve really seen people embracing the diversity.
“But there isn’t a lot of variety in this area, so I think this is a good spot for us.”
Filipino cuisine moved into Australia’s wider cultural consciousness in the early 2020s, when the vivid purple of its indigenous purple yam, ube, made it a popular ingredient on social media.
At Adhika it makes an appearance in an iced ube matcha: a visually stunning drink with sweet, creamy swirls of fudgy house-made ube halaya (jam) and green matcha so bright they seem artificial (they’re not).
You’d think it would be an easy choice, but the drinks list throws up another strong contender in the leche flan latte.
“I repurposed the [excess] leche flan at Takam and blended it with condensed milk and caramelised sugar, creating a pipeable [mousse] to put on top and to incorporate into the coffee,” Aguirre says. “We finish it up with a sprinkling of Murray [River] salt flakes … inspired by the salted coffee we had in Vietnam.”
There’s also specialty coffee, served until 3pm with grab-and-go snacks such as chicken empanadas and banana bread after the kitchen shuts.
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