Meet Chef Neil
Neil Syham is a seasoned chef (Institute of Culinary Education) with over 6 years experience in fine dining, formerly with Tides Seafood (LES), Gramercy Park Hotel, as a corporate chef for a small startup firm, and most recently with the executive dining group for JPMorgan. With Neil’s Filipino-Chinese background and classic culinary training, he focuses on Asian flavor profiles and loves to use a spectrum of sweet, salty, sour and hot components in his food.
Hometown: Staten Island, NY
Current Residence: Brooklyn, NY
Website: Lumpia Shack
Facebook: Lumpia Shack Page
Current Gig:
My wife and I opened Lumpia Shack and Adobo Shack in 2012 re-creating our childhood favorite foods using local and organic ingredients! We sell our lumpia and adobo every Saturday and Sunday from April-November exclusively at the Smorgasburg markets in Brooklyn, NY.
I am a seasoned cook/chef with experience in NYC's restaurant and hospitality industry. My wife Angie has been a RN in NYC and now manages our business.
Is the adobo you are sharing here served at your business?
Yes:
Lumpia Shack: We serve variations of fried lumpia shanghai that play off food we loved eating as kids and adults. We offer a variety of different fillings-- including adobo, sinigang, lechon, peking duck and even pinakbet-- inside crispy, fried spring rolls. Our most recent special of the week was a garlic rice lumpia shanghai topped with crispy adobo heritage pork belly.
Adobo Shack is our sister stand where we sell adobo over rice, and pan de sal sliders. We feature 3 types of Adobo - classic chicken, pork belly and a vegetarian tofu. All our ingredients are non-gmo, pasture raised and antibiotic-free.
Tell me about the Filipino food culture in NYC/Brooklyn:
There are pockets of established Filipino communities throughout the boroughs that have been home to some longstanding restaurants and stores. But within the last decade, Filipino food has received more attention and gained popularity, with newer restaurants that have opened in Manhattan and Brooklyn with hopes to target a wider audience. Also in the last few years, new outdoor markets have opened up, giving cooks and those who have dreamed of selling their homemade specialties an opportunity to sell their food without the risk of opening a full brick-and-mortar.
We thought this would be the best place to introduce our food and opened up a stand serving lumpia exclusively. People liked it, even though they weren’t familiar with Filipino food, and soon we opened up Adobo Shack to offer a heartier meal to compliment the spring rolls.
We won NYC's 2012 Vendy Award for the best market vendor of the year!
We are about to open our first restaurant here in NYC, where we will serve a counter service menu of lumpia, adobo, pancit and other Filipino-inspired dishes. We like to say 'inspired' because although we try to keep the soul of filipino food in our dishes, we try to incorporate local ingredients and use modern techniques to create our own interpretations of the Filipino versions.
What would you want patrons to experience at Lumpia Shack and Adobo Shack?
We really love when people try our food and are amazed at what they are tasting. We use a combination of sweet, sour, salty, bitter and spicy flavor profiles that we hope people will really enjoy. It's truly the best feeling to share the tastes that we grew up eating with a wider audience.
What has been the most challenging part of opening a Filipino restaurant?
Sometimes we feel that people expect Asian food to be cheap and taste authentic or exactly like other food they’ve had before. We don't aim to be 100% authentic even though we want to respect the food of our culture. Another thing that’s important to us is to use local, seasonal, and organic ingredients as much as possible. We want to support small farms and businesses because that is the food we buy for ourselves at home and we wouldn’t want the things that we buy for our business to be any different. When we feel like authentic Filipino food we go home to our parents and grandparents. Nothing ever beats home cooked food by the people you love most, but it’s definitely not what we’re trying to serve. Of course there are many other challenges to opening a restaurant (as well as cooking and serving food under a tent outside!) that we couldn’t have ever imagined before, but if people like our food then it’s all worth it. That’s all we want!
Becoming a chef was my second career, but I should have known long before when I first went to school at Binghamton University that I wanted to cook for a living. All my friends would come over when I cooked lumpia and adobo, and I made those dishes in particular because they reminded me of home. Now more than a decade later, I’m still cooking those dishes!
Garlic Rice Lumpia and Adobo Pork Belly
Recipe by Chef Neil Syham
Adobo Pork Belly
Ingredients
3 pounds pork belly, cut into 1-2 inch square pieces
1 cup white or coconut vinegar
1 cup water
1/2 cup soy sauce
4 bay leaves
2 head garlic, crushed and peeled
1 tsp black peppercorns
Procedure
Blanch pork belly in boiling water and drain
Add all ingredients in a pot with the pork belly meat side down
Cover for about 90 minutes, turning on each side until tender
Garlic Rice
Ingredients:
Butter
Olive oil
Minced parsley
Salt and pepper
12 cloves garlic, minced
4 cups cooked long-grain rice
Procedure
Using a pan or a separate wok, heat a tablespoon of oil over moderate heat and add the minced garlic. Saute the garlic, stirring constantly to prevent it from burning. When the garlic is crispy and golden, remove it from the pan (leave the garlic oil in the pan) and set aside.
Add 2 more tablespoons of oil to the pan or wok and stir in the rice. Make sure all the rice is coated with oil and then spread it across the pan in an even layer. Cook for a couple of minutes, then stir and repeat this process until the rice is heated through and starting to brown. Add parsley to garnish.
Lumpia
Ingredients
Garlic Rice
25 Spring Roll Wrappers (use wrappers without egg)
Egg wash
Procedure
Lay out spring roll wrapper, add 1 - 2 tablespoons of garlic rice, and roll up the lumpia! Seal with egg wash. Repeat. Pre-heat a pot of oil to 375F or use a deep fryer. Fry for 5 minutes or until golden brown.
Top the lumpia with adobo pork belly and adobo sauce.
What makes your adobo special?
This adobo plays off of our childhood favorite dishes—lumpia, garlic rice, and adobo. I try to come up with something different for our specials so after a customer asked if we served rice, I decided to stuff our lumpia with garlic rice and top them with a healthy portion of pork belly adobo and sauce! The crispiness of the lumpia combined with the flavor of the adobo pork and sauce makes for a great combination. This adobo recipe is also a great way to use leftovers!
Aside from adobo, name a Filipino food that everyone should try at least once and why?
Fresh Lumpia! It’s what our families make and eat for occasions and get-togethers. It takes a whole day of prep work and is served with a variety of different toppings. Everyone can dress their own lumpia and it’s kind of wrapped and eaten like a burrito. Quite different from the lumpia shanghai that we serve at our stand.
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