#209: OKO

The Bar

OKO. 1100 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 4/5/2025 @ 9:30pm.

The Drink

Rock Lee. Citadelle Jardin d'Été gin, pandan, plum, ponzu. $19.

Every so often on this project I get served a cocktail that impresses me more than delights me. Evidently named after a character from the anime Naruto, this was by far the sparkliest drink I've yet been served. A quick glossary: pandan is a fragrant flower often used in Southeast Asian cooking, ponzu is a Japanese citrus vinaigrette sauce, and the Jardin d'Été gin is a slightly more Asian edition of their standard gin, with yuzu, melon, and orange peel. The sparkle came from the edible glitter on the dried plum (NOT a prune) you can see perched atop the rim of the glass. Savory cocktails often provoke a strongly mixed or polarized response from people since your brain spends more time going "hmm, this isn't what cocktails usually taste like" than analyzing the flavors themselves; by the end of this one I knew I liked it, but I might have preferred a simpler gin cocktail with only 1 or 2 of the other ingredients. The other cocktails on the list are all similarly eclectic. When I was looking up Filipino cocktails afterwards I discovered the kagatan, which is sort of their version of an Irish coffee; it's not on the menu, but if I go back, I'll see if they can make that.

The Crew

Aaron, Ishani, Elijah.

Notes

The wheel of time continues to turn on this property; as the sun once set on East Side Showroom to rise on Ah Sing Den, it has now set on Ah Sing Den in order to rise once more on OKO, a very upscale Filipino restaurant that is the latest project from ubiquitous local super-chef Paul Qui. Austin has never been known for its Filipino cuisine, for essentially purely demographic reasons (there are fewer than 5,000 in the city proper), which gives prospective Pinoy restauranteurs the classic dilemma of either opening a low-cost food truck serving mainly street food or opening a high-cost brick and mortar of high-end cuisine. Either option risks neglecting the "middling cuisine", as Rachel Laudan put it, that most average people typically eat and enjoy, which is one reason why immigrant restauranteurs sometimes struggle with finding a business model that fits the food they want to serve in addition to all the other ones of labor, etc. Qui and his partners chose the latter option for OKO (which interestingly is from the Hawaiian word oko'a, meaning "different/separate/independent" and not a Tagalog word), which is a drag from a wallet perspective, but on the other hand the food was absolutely delicious. We had:

• Baboy (pork skewers).
• Manok (chicken skewers).
• Pancit canton (stir fry noodles).
• Roti.
• Basque-style lemon cheesecake.

All of it was superb. Austin might not be as encouraging to new restaurants as it could be (due in part to our zoning restrictions which artificially hamper the low end of the market), but the ones which do make it are usually top notch.