If you like bacon-and-egg rolls, you’ll love the bulakenya sandwich at Adhika

Filipino$$$$

Ever dipped a spoon into a Milo tin and unloaded a mountain of crackly cocoa-malt grains straight into your mouth? Adhika co-owner Aileen Aguirre believes every child in the Philippines has done this, and the ritual helped inspire the menu at her new Rushcutters Bay cafe.

Aguirre and fellow chef Francis Dela Cruz are known for showcasing flavours from their homeland: they launched Darlinghurst’s Takam in 2023, with its inventive Filipino-inspired brunches, before reworking it into a dinner-focused venue with cocktails and wine.

In September, they opened Adhika (with Takam’s Giannina Abiva and new business partners Nonie Ferrer and Christopher Lumapas) and it’s a win for diners who missed how they channelled the Philippines into Sydney’s breakfast scene.

The iced Milo latte – with its caffeinated base of Campos Superior blend and floating mass of powdery crunch – taps into their youthful memories. Because it’s so entrenched in the Philippines, they didn’t realise Milo was Australian until opening Adhika. Thomas Mayne’s choc-malt powder, which debuted at 1934’s Sydney Royal Easter Show, was originally a “health tonic” for kids and is now embraced everywhere, from Jamaica to Nigeria.

Adhika’s caramelised crumpets evoke banana cue: a beloved Filipino street food where the headline fruit is cooked until explosively sweet. Here, crumpets are coated with butter, honey and brown sugar and pan-bronzed until the exterior’s dark and crusty.

It tastes like breakfast supercharged with afternoon tea. Imagine a charred pancake that riffs on banana bread and scones, thanks to accompanying redcurrant jelly, whipped cream and banana haleya (Filipino jam). When I first saw it on the menu, I Googled “haleya” to learn more, and the team encourages this curiosity. Adhika’s food can hopefully “open a door [where we can speak] about our heritage, culture and cuisine”, says Aguirre.

Hamon bulakenya, for instance, is served during special occasions (and is significant in the Bulacan region), but for Dela Cruz, it recalls festive season in the Philippines, where offices give away so much meat for Christmas, you end up with “five hams in the fridge”. Adhika’s hamon bulakenya is a three-day commitment: Byron Bay pork neck is cured, cooked in a pineapple-rum-beer glaze, coated with brown sugar and slow-torched.

Dela Cruz says hamon bulakenya is on the decline as it’s “very tedious” (some approaches take five days), but here, it endures in a brekkie roll with greens, cheese and barbecue sauce. My boyfriend pronounces it a perfectly seamless remix of a bacon and egg roll. It’s served on soft pandesal bread from Doonside’s Starlight Bakery, which has baked Filipino loaves since 2000. The custom-made rolls required three months of fine-tuning with the bakery, and they’re an especially great platform for Adhika’s sandwich lined with thick slabs of cheese and egg.

The drinks are attention-worthy too. The mandatory take on matcha is as psychedelic as a 1960s album cover: vivid green-tea tones contrasting with bright purple smears of jam and cream flavoured with ube – the sweet but mild root vegetable that powers many Filipino desserts.

My favourite thing to sip at Adhika is the leche flan latte, however, which smartly repurposes Takam’s Filipino creme caramel leftovers. Blitzed with cream, sea salt flakes and espresso, and served with more flan whirled through the glass, it tastes like a caramel-rich Vietnamese coffee: unapologetically sweet, delicious and worth many refills.

Adhika is Tagalog for “dream” and the space is wistfully adorned with pandesal art, jeepneys and other bric-a-brac evoking the Philippines. It’s lively rather than museum-like, similar to the kitchen’s energised way of using baseline Filipino flavours to chart Sydney’s multicultural cafe culture. Everything is done with the child-like joy of crunching through pure Milo.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.

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