Long-simmered Filipino soup, charcoal-grilled pork and wild cocktails at re-imagined Auntie’s in Norfolk

Auntie’s has a brand new bag.

Since it opened three years ago, Auntie’s has been an ever-evolving home to Filipino food and meticulously crafted tiki cocktails — moving from Virginia Beach to Norfolk, and across multiple menus filled with casual takes on island classics.

But after closing for renovations in January, Auntie’s has re-imagined itself as an ambitious and expansive vision of Filipino dining and drinking, helmed by a chef who’s cooked at upscale restaurants from D.C. to the Napa Valley — including a stint at what may be the most well-known Filipino restaurant in America, the notoriously packed Bad Saint in Washington.

That will mean charcoal-grilled skewers, laborious mami noodle soups cooked for 12 hours from stock, tamarind-rich sinigang stew with pork spareribs, and laborious half-chickens that take three days to prepare.

Owner Doddie Braza said this is a vision of Auntie’s that had long been in his head — scratch-made, elevated Filipino food that paid homage to the food he loved most from his childhood — but it took the pandemic to make him really think about the kind of restaurant he wanted to run.

“We were closed for two months last spring, for quarantine,” Braza said. “We had two months off, and that was a lot of time for reflection. And there were a lot of things I wanted to do.”

At the time, his kitchen was just a flat-top grill and a fryer — in a space home to countless previous restaurants in its Colley Avenue location, from Lou’s Bar to Shiptown. He couldn’t do the menu he wanted without bringing in new equipment. And so during the early days of the pandemic, he kept to his casual mainstays.

But in the meantime, he slowly worked out his plans to change the restaurant into the one he had in his head. He planned renovations to the kitchen. And he bought out his business partners — in the process bringing in chef Abriel Levantino to take over the kitchen and the menu. Levantino had cooked at the restaurant before, and shared Braza’s expansive vision for the restaurant.

“We had kept in touch. I was brainstorming ideas, and helping [Braza] work on menu items, even when I wasn’t even working there,” Levantino said. “I missed it. And for me, Auntie’s always felt like unfinished business.”

The opening menu, they said, is their “desert island food,” the flavors they love most in the Filipino food they grew up with. For Levantino, his first thought was mami noodle soup, a fatty, hearty, bold chicken noodle soup slow-cooked from marrow-rich stock and funked up with a bit of fish sauce.

For Braza, his thoughts went first to fish, which the restaurant brings in fresh and whole from the ocean, scaling and aging it in-house to concentrate the flavor.

“We’re learning the timing for each fish,” Levantino said. “For flounder it might be four or five days.”

The restaurant also cures and ages its own pork and chicken, for the crispy pata and half-chicken dishes. The same goes for the oxtail in the almond-and-annatto kare kare stew. The lumpia is now served in the longer Shanghai style, with pork ground fresh each day. The sauces, from a red chili buko to a Chinese-style chili crisp, are also made fresh. Levantino also added a robust menu of vegan options, made with mushroom or Impossible “meat.”

The menu will change with the seasons, Braza and Levantino said, as more fresh produce becomes available locally. And in addition to the elevated Filipino dinner plates, the restaurant also plans to expand into a market and grill.

Depending on the day, a market counter in the front of the restaurant might sell sauces and pandesal buns and pepperoni bread — a Virginia Beach Filipino specialty — from Angie��s or other local bakeries, alongside rotating lunch boxes of whatever the restaurant’s cooks happened to make as their shared staff meal.

“Maybe I’ll make chicken adobo,” Braza said, “and we’ll put it on Facebook and Instagram: Get it while it’s here.”

On Sundays when the weather heats up, he and Levantino hope to serve charcoal-grilled street food out front — maybe some fresh-made sisig and skewers, along with patio drinks and the Philippines’ famous taho tofu-custard dessert, served on the streets of Manila from buckets suspended over a street vendor’s shoulder.

On a day-to-day basis, desserts at Auntie’s include a tender pineapple-and-banana bread pudding, flash-roasted in banana leaves until it’s lightly kissed by smoke, then doused in a rum-based sauce.

And then, of course, there will be the cocktails. Braza plans to double down on the Filipino roots of tiki drinks, pulling from the long history of tiki that goes back to the legendary Ray Buhen of Tiki-Ti, arguably a more important force for cocktail invention than Don the Beachcomber’s owner ever was.

“What did I want it to be? I want it to be Filipino,” Braza said. “A historically minded approach with a strong focus on Filipino-invented tiki cocktails, and I’ll expand into doing more originals. More Mariano Licudine (of Fort Lauderdale’s Mai-Kai). More Ray Buhen.”

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Auntie’s reopened Feb. 10 in its new incarnation, with takeout and a small number of in-house seats available. The lunch market and Sunday grill days will follow in the coming weeks and months, and may evolve over time.

“We’re going to play around with stuff,” Braza said. “The Philippines has the oldest Chinatown in the world, and so there are a lot of Chinese dishes we might play around with.”

“Basically anything we can grill, we’re going to grill,” Levantino said.

Braza brings up the notion of cooking the Philippines’ famous lechon pig roast on their outdoor grill.

“You think we can get a whole pig in that thing?” he says, laughing.

Auntie’s is open for takeout and dine-in at 4314 Colley Ave., Norfolk, 757-524-4909, auntiestiki.com (also check instagram.com/auntiesnfk for specials and events). Open 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays through Saturdays, and 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sundays. Reservations at resy.com.

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com