It's a Thursday evening well into the first semester of the school year, and Umi Nom is half-empty. Which is a shame, since nearly everything I've tasted there has been superb. The restaurant is berthed on Myrtle Avenue on the eastern edge of the Pratt campus, in a Sargasso Sea of a neighborhood between Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant—where trash often clogs the gutters and the nearest liquor store (three blocks east near Franklin Avenue) defends its booze with Plexiglas. You have to purchase your wine via a little sliding box, which I did—a bargain bottle of Chianti for $10. Despite a moniker meaning "Drink" in Tagalog, Umi Nom is still BYOB after being open 15 months. Don't hold your breath that the liquor license will ever arrive. In the meantime, the place is struggling along without it.
The joint occupies a narrow storefront with a refreshingly plain, bare-brick interior and lots of dark polished woods. Lighting is provided by a series of nifty fixtures implanted in bamboo logs. Umi Nom is an offshoot of the Lower East Side's Kuma Inn, where a playful take on Philippine food forms the centerpiece of a pan-Asian menu in tapas-size portions. The chef, King Phojanakong, is the American-born child of Philippine and Thai parents, and his résumé includes Bouley and other high-end refectories. Filipino fare has been the hardest of Southeast Asian cuisines to popularize, since its wild diversity of influences (Spanish, Chinese, Polynesian, and American) and startling combinations of ingredients (white vinegar, fish sauce, and pig blood, for example) resist adaptation.
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