Eleven years ago, if you wanted to eat Jess Granada's cooking, you had to find her at a night market. The stall was about four square metres. The menu, 'Taco pao, six dollars', was written on a chalkboard, and most nights it was covered in the words 'SOLD OUT' by seven o'clock. This year, Cuisine awarded her restaurant a hat.
Nanam sits on Hurstmere Road in Takapuna, and if you have walked past it, you will know the room before you know the food. Stone walls, a fireplace, woven baskets hanging from the ceiling, and a private dining room built around a single long table that seats thirty. What you might not know is how far the food on those tables has travelled to get there.
Jess grew up in Antique, in the Western Visayas region of the Philippines. She learned to cook at home, the way most Filipinos do, by being in the kitchen while someone older cooked and eventually being handed something to stir. She did not come to New Zealand to open a restaurant. The night market came first. Then a small eatery in Royal Oak. Then, more than a decade after the first market stall, Takapuna.
"For a long time, people would come in, look at the menu, and ask what adobo was," says her business partner and co-owner Andrew Soriano. "You would explain it, and then they would order the steak." That is not what happens now.
Filipino food, Spanish form
Nanam describes itself as modern Filipino-Spanish, which sounds like a fusion restaurant, but it's not. The Philippines was a Spanish colony for more than three hundred years, and the evidence sits in the language of the food: adobo, lechon, escabeche, sarsa. The words are Spanish, but the dishes are not. Jess's menu takes that history seriously. Pork lechon, slow-roasted, with a sauce built from roasted artichoke and apple. Lumpia. croquetas. Crispy duck. Sizzling sisig with octopus. Wagyu beef and lemongrass tacos.
Cuisine's guide singles out the lumpia and croquetas, the crispy duck and the pork lechon, and describes a restaurant where traditional Filipino flavours meet modern dining and New Zealand ingredients. Nanam scored seventeen. It is the first hat the restaurant has been given, and the first awarded to a Takapuna restaurant.
What is a Cuisine 'hat'?
Not everyone follows restaurant awards, so here's the short version. This year Cuisine assessed 400 restaurants across New Zealand and awarded 110 hats. 67 restaurants in the country hold one hat. Nanam is one of them. The judges arrive unannounced, eat as ordinary customers and pay their own bill. No restaurant can enter, nominate itself or buy a place. Cuisine has been doing this for almost four decades, and its editor Kelli Brett describes the guide's job as telling a food story that stretches further than the handful of cities international attention tends to land on.
Valladolid, Spain
The hat is not the only thing that's happened to Jess this year. She was also named in Cuisine's Top 50 Women in Food and Drink for 2026. And before either of those, she won the Australasian Tapas Championship, which took her to Valladolid in Spain to compete at the World Tapas Competition, representing New Zealand. She entered a dish called The Storyteller. It was a big moment for Jess; a Filipino chef carrying the New Zealand flag into Spain, with her own roots on the plate and the best of New Zealand produce behind her. "That trip changed how she cooks," says Andrew. "Not the techniques. The confidence."
Salo-salo
There is a Filipino word for it: salo-salo. The nearest English is 'a shared meal', which misses it, because in the Philippines, the sharing is not the format. It is the reason. Ask a Filipino where family actually happens, and they will not say the house; they will say the table. It is where news gets broken, arguments get settled, and the person who has been quiet for a month finally says something. None of it is scheduled. It happens because everybody sat down at the same time and stayed there.
That quality time has quietly become hard to arrange. People eat at different hours now, in different rooms, with a phone in one hand. Getting everyone around one table, at once, for longer than an hour, takes an effort it never used to take.
This is the reason Jess and Andrew built the dining room. Giving the private dining room one long table instead of several small ones was a decision rather than a layout, and so were the fireplace and the baskets overhead. "Filipinos do not ask whether you are hungry," says Jess. "We just feed you." The set feast is built for groups from four to thirty, and nobody has to order anything. The private dining room takes thirty to forty-five, the whole venue up to a hundred.
Eleven years ago all of it was a chalkboard, four square metres of stall, and people eating six-dollar taco pao standing up. The room has changed. The reason has not. A year from now nobody at your table will remember exactly what they ordered; they will remember who was there, and that nobody wanted to go home.
Nanam
178 Hurstmere Road, Takapuna
Dinner Tuesday to Saturday, lunch Friday and Saturday.
nanam.co.nz
