Pinoy Accent: chef Jorge Mendez turns a familiar accent into Quezon City’s newest wine bar

The space was once home to Tadeo, Mendez’s Filipino-Mexican comfort food concept known for dishes like sisig tacos and sinigang burrito. It’s a fitting address for Pinoy Accent, where his evolving expression of Filipino cuisine takes new shape.

“At Pinoy Accent, we are not trying to reinvent Filipino cuisine,” Mendez explains. “We’re not trying to change what it already is. Instead, we’re exploring how familiarity can be experienced in new ways—how the dishes we grew up with can be seen from a different angle, without losing their soul.”

The question remains: why a wine bar? “Well, it’s very typical to enjoy Filipino food as is,” observes Mendez. There aren’t many restaurants that deliberately pair Filipino flavours with wine, and there are even fewer that manage to do so very well. To take on the challenge, Mendez tapped his good friend and frequent collaborator Ian Santos, whom the chef describes as “one of the best sommeliers here in Manila.”

“When designing the wine list, we had one thing in mind: to let the food lead the conversation,” Santos shares. As Pinoy Accent’s sommelier-consultant, Santos curated a listing built to highlight chef Mendez’s menu, leveraging the food’s salt, fat and acid to create harmonious pairings. He adds: “It’s a small selection that will not only balance flavours and elevate the dining experience, but also accentuate chef Jorge’s menu.”

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The menu features many dishes you’d expect to see at a wine bar—each, of course, elevated with a Pinoy twist. A piping of creamy chicken liver mousse is cleverly balanced with latik sauce, tuba jelly and langka purée. Smoked salmon takes the form of salmon tinapa: salmon sashimi smoked with coconut husks, bathed in a bright pininyahang gochujang sauce and topped with finely julienned libas leaves for a refreshing finish. Should you choose to indulge in some pours from the bar (and you most definitely should), the Bohigas Reserva Brut Cava begs to be savoured alongside their crispy potato chips with soaked kiniing, fried egg and tultul salt.

Then there are the dishes based on Filipino favourites, like siomai, kinilaw and puto, only for them to arrive at the table and subvert all expectations. Mendez stuffs the essence of chicken and shrimp siomai into a nostalgic nugget, complete with accoutrements like calamansi sour cream and chilli-garlic. Kinilaw comes inverted: slices of luxurious hamachi sashimi cloaked in coconut foam and cut with a pucker-worthy kinilaw sorbet, deepened further by paitum (burnt coconut) oil. Calasiao’s famed ube puto is reimagined here as a canele, stood over a pool of salted egg sauce—adorned with juicy crab claw meat and ito togarashi, which feel less like nods to Some Thai, Mōdan or Mugen Ramenya as they do a natural extension of his culinary language.

Similarly, the bopis ragu draws heavily on his enduring love for Italian cuisine, which comes to life at Cibo and Makanai. Here, he transforms the laborious beef lungs into a comforting ragu, hidden under a playful mishmash of various handmade pasta shapes, kesong puti fondue, annatto oil and keso de bola grated fresh at the table. Even Tadeo lives on through the dry sinigang: crispy pork belly with sinigang rice and honey patis.

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With six wines available by the glass, many more by the bottle and many still to come, it would be amiss to stop at just one. Consider the Château La Coste ‘Lady A,’ a crisp, classic Provençal rosé primed for shellfish. It’s an easy match for the prawn sarciado and its house shoku-pandesal, or the lobster luglog, with its tinapa flakes and heady lobster bisque foam. “Collaborating with Ian, I think that’s our strong point here,” Mendez reveals. “Ian really designed the wines to pair with our food.” Not sure what to pair next? Just flip the wine list—Santos has conveniently listed six more pairings to save you the burden of guesswork.

Once you’re well-fed and merry, all that’s left to do is dig into dessert. The espasol tres leches recalls Tadeo’s beloved horchata with a warm, nutty profile, while the pastillas cheesecake layers cream cheese, Camembert, kesong puti, keso de bola and carabao’s milk into a richer and slightly funky treat. Finally, there’s the delightfully dense sticky langka pudding, which somehow tastes like a comforting blend of banana bread and sticky toffee pudding, finished with a quenelle of muscovado-soy sauce ice cream.

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Pinoy Accent was not designed as a means to correct or “elevate” Filipino cuisine, but rather to celebrate those flavours, and the ability of those memories to elicit powerful emotions—much like hearing a familiar accent on a long journey home. “Filipino food is my comfort food,” says Mendez. "I love it as it is, but I wanted to make it more interesting by combining it with international techniques."

“Really,” he adds, “it’s to show people that with just a single component—or just a single accent—our flavours truly shine. Pinoy Accent is not just another form of Filipino food; it’s a new expression of Filipino flavours.”

Pinoy Accent is located at The Ignacia Place, 62 Sgt. Esguerra Ave, Diliman, Quezon City, Metro Manila, and opens to the public on July 1, 2026. Walk-ins only.

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