Nicole Ponseca has spent the better part of 20 years trying to bring Filipino food to the “culinary table.”

Before she became a restaurant owner, she was an ad exec by day and a dishwasher, hostess and server, by night.

“Everything that I could do to learn this business because 90% of restaurants fail within year one,” Ponseca said. “And there are very few, if any, women and people of color who own and run a successful restaurant.”

This hard work eventually led to her owning two Filipino restaurants in Manhattan’s East Village by 2012 — Maharlika and Jeepney.

Though both locations rose to prominence, even considered two of the “best Filipino restaurants in the city” and praised for Ponseca’s take on modern Filipino cooking, they are now closed.

Maharlika shut its doors in 2019 after nine years and Jeepney closed on Sept. 25, also after nine years.

Raising Filipino food to the level of popularity in New York City that its Asian counterparts like Thai, Japanese, Chinese and others experience has been a years-long journey for so many restaurateurs.

And while COVID-19 has severely impacted the restaurant industry across the board, Filipino restaurants have faced unique struggles in their pivot to takeout due to the cuisine's relative unfamiliarity. 

“The number one struggle is, right now, Filipino cuisine is not really up there yet when it's compared to Chinese, Japanese, Korean, even towards Southeast Asian counterparts, like Vietnamese or Thai,” said Jappy Afzelius, owner of Tsimis, a Filipino American restaurant and wine bar on the Lower East Side. “We are so far behind. We are still considered something exotic.”

That means when the city pivoted to takeout during the pandemic, Filipino food wasn’t necessarily top on customers’ lists, Afzelius said. 

“It's not, like, a daily meal,” he said. “When you're at home in your apartment, you're talking to your girlfriend and you're, like, ‘Let’s have Asian today. OK, What do we want? Chinese? Thai?’ Filipino is slowly getting into that conversation more.”

There are currently 37 Filipino restaurants across the five boroughs, according to the Consulate General of the Philippines’ Cultural & Public Diplomacy department. Five of those restaurants shuttered during the pandemic, including Jeepney.

Given that many people are unfamiliar with Filipino food, when they do visit restaurants, they’re coming for the full experience of Filipino culture, something that a diner can’t get from takeout.

“We offer the complete experience — once you go inside the Filipino restaurant, not only do you feel the Filipino hospitality, the warmness of the people there as well as taste the richness of our cuisine,” said Arman Talbo, Cultural & Public Diplomacy supervisor at the Philippine Consulate General of New York. “It's not mainstream yet, but definitely we are on our way.”

Over the past decade, familiarity with Filipino food has increased, according to people in the industry.

When Ponseca was first venturing into the restaurant business, Filipino food was a much more foreign concept. A savory Filipino delicacy, balut or fertilized duck egg, was even featured on the reality TV show “Fear Factor” in 2002.

“Where we were 10 years ago, it's not where we are now,” Ponseca said. “Serving barbecue of offals might have been very shocking before or me serving balut openly and proudly and loudly, was very different, or chicken feet. All of these dishes had a cloud over it.”

She credits her restaurant and other Filipino eateries — and even celebrities like Anthony Bourdain — for helping to change perceptions.

There are also efforts like Filipino Restaurant Week, which started in 2015 and that Ponseca helped to organize with the Philippines Consulate. It’s modeled on New York Restaurant Week with its prix fixe menu and serves as a way to raise awareness of the Filipino food scene and build a network for those in the community.

While familiarity with Filipino cuisine may have improved over the years, opening and operating a Filipino restaurant still isn’t easy, according to experts. 

Not only are there the typical risks involved in opening a restaurant such as access to capital, hiring the right staff and even physical labor, the unfamiliarity of the food and the emphasis on French or Italian cooking in the culinary world adds another obstacle.

“I remember getting recommendations from people saying, ‘Oh, you should put photos of the food on the menu,’ ” said Ponseca, about opening her restaurants. “But I never saw that at Italian restaurants or French restaurants.”

Afzelius received his culinary training in France and eventually his master’s in Italy before opening Tsimis in 2013. 

“It took a while for me to kind of come back to Filipino cuisine but I'm happy it's the career path that I took because it makes it even more personal for me now that I'm able to share what I enjoyed growing up,” he said. 

While COVID-19 did negatively impact Jeepney, whose customer base was heavily based on tourism, the decision to close had actually been years in the making. 

Without the backing of funds from a major restaurant group, she found herself limited in the type of service she wanted to run, she said. 

“I opened with so little money that sometimes I felt bad when people would come from all over the world and I didn't feel like I was delivering to a standard that I know is possible,” she said.

She found herself huddled in the basement of Jeepney, managing reservations, and questioning as far back as 2016 whether operating the restaurant this way was the right decision.

“I would ask myself and the universe and God, ‘Is this my trajectory? Am I beholden to managing the restaurant like this?’ ” she said.

COVID provided that sign for Ponseca, whose father died of coronavirus in December. 

Even for restaurants that stayed open, recovering from the losses of the pandemic continue.

“It’s been a struggle up to now and we're still trying to get customers in and trying to bring sales back from where it was in 2019,” Afzelius said. “We’re far from being normal.”

Still, Ponseca and others are hopeful and optimistic about the future of Filipino food in New York City — despite the ups and downs of the industry.

Though five Filipino restaurants closed during the pandemic, three restaurants opened: Tradisyon and Bilao in Manhattan and Kuya’s Lechon in Queens.

Ponseca’s focused for now on operating her Jeepney location in Miami, which she opened in January, and the launch of her food on Goldbelly, an e-commerce platform for restaurant food that boomed during the pandemic. That means come October, New Yorkers will be able to order their favorite Jeepney dishes like lumpia, barbecue and pancit. 

And though she’s not setting up any expectations for herself, she’s open to what the future may hold for her and other Filipino entrepreneurs in New York City. 

“There's so many more people in the culinary arts and now they're saying, ‘Hey, I want to do my own food. I don't want to cook someone else's food,’” said Ponseca. “We'll probably see more Filipino restaurants to come in the next two, three, four or five years that will make a dent in culinary in New York City and beyond.”

Tune into our conversation with the chef and restaurateur Nicole Ponseca on Friday, 10/1 at 5:30 p.m. EST on NY1's Instagram, where she’ll also demo live how to make pancit.