“Sniff,” Michael Stern, the pioneering chronicler of edible Americana, instructed his readers.

Stern wanted fellow food appreciators to inhale the perfume of sizzling pork, in all its glorious manifestations, while pausing to reflect on the place responsible for it. Here, he wrote in his 2016 column, you can feast on dishes of “quality almost assured.” Here, “You come as you are, and eat what you like, nutrition nannies be damned.”

His paean wasn’t addressed to Abstrakt Filipino Essence, which was still four years away from appearing on the Jacksonville scene as a palm green truck parked at the Court Urban Food Park. What the Roadfood author was saluting was the platonic ideal of a diner, possibly this country’s most valuable restaurant genre (particularly if you’re running for office.) But he could have been describing Abstrakt’s permanent home in a Beach Boulevard strip mall, where the restaurant took up residence in February.

To be sure, chef-owner JoJo Hernandez — a leader of Northeast Florida’s #morethanlumpia movement, celebrating the complexity and nuances of diasporan Filipino cuisine — has higher ambitions than frying eggs and slinging noodles. It’s evident in the pureed eggplant graced with fermented fish paste that accompanies the oxtail kare kare; the aioli, heated with Sriracha and sweetened by maple syrup, which functions as a chicken tocino condiment; the sausage-spiked succotash served alongside pork belly adobo.

Lovely all around. Most of Hernandez’s tweaks, twists, and spins are well-chosen, and executed with an attentiveness that he no doubt honed during his two decades as a country club chef. Plus, like a crucifix to a vampire, those idiosyncratic touches ward off complaints from diners anticipating replicas of their grandmothers’ cooking.

Still, I wouldn’t trade one serving of Abstrakt’s longganisa silog for all three of the aforementioned entrees. Not even if you threw in a slice of ube cheesecake and a coupon for my next visit.

Silog sounds like one of those meals you couldn’t screw up, because its elemental components are so straightforward, but that wrongheaded belief won’t survive an encounter with Abstrakt’s brilliant interpretation of the icon. Befitting a dish that’s made for mixing, the term “silog” comes from smashing two words together: Sinangang is garlic fried rice, and itog is an egg. Since the two-syllable expression doesn’t reference any particular protein, there are no rules about what completes the three-part dish: it could be dried fish, fried chicken, Spam, or the remnants of last night’s dinner.

At Abstrakt, the choices include ribbons of soy-soaked beef, grilled salmon, and longganisa, a brown-sugared sausage. In Hernandez’s hands, the last is a magnificent encapsulation of pork that somehow snags all the flavor supplied by fat without getting bogged down in its grease. Yet there’s just enough shine on the patty’s charred surface, daubed with sliced scallions, to match the luminescence of the fried egg’s yolk. Because the egg on my plate was bronzed at its edges, I initially feared that yolk might not budge when I poked it with my fork, but it dripped forth compliantly, mingling with soft white rice that gets its crunch from fried garlic.

Not counting a New York strip silog that I didn’t get a chance to try, silog is only served at Abstrakt on Sundays from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. That’s a departure from the diner aesthetic, but everything else about the dish is perfectly, enticingly aligned with it: The unabashed use of sugar and salt. The shades of hangover curative. The pork aroma.

Again, I don’t think Hernandez set out to create a diner, but that which at Abstrakt reminded me of late-night tuna melt sandwiches and black coffee also persuaded me that the diner—at least as popular culture defines it—might well represent a restaurant’s highest calling.

After all, the diner is for everyone. (Abstrakt has a kids’ menu, listing chicken tenders, fried mac-and-cheese balls, and grilled cheese on soft, yeasty pandesal bread.) The diner understands that folks work and want something warm and comforting when they clock out. (#Morethanlumpia campaigns aside, when a tired-looking woman walked in and ordered lumpia to go on a Saturday night, Abstrakt almost instantly produced a takeout box of the brittle-skinned spring rolls.) The diner is good every time. (True, I only went twice, but I’ve got a good feeling about Abstrakt.)

Really, I don’t think there was any way for Hernandez to avoid the symmetry. On the eastern wall of Abstrakt’s mildly modernist dining room—furnished with sturdy blonde wood tables and accented with tropical elements, such as a photographic mural of sugarcane pasted beneath the pass—there’s a portrait of the Abstrakt food truck, presumably to remind customers of the business’ origins.

But it seems like their roots are showing.

America’s first diners were stalled lunch wagons with stools, followed by more elaborate operations that occupied broken-down trolleys. Later, the relationship between diners and transportation was sealed by companies that built turnkey operations that they could deliver to buyers by hitching them on to trains. As Richard Gutman wrote in his 2000 history, American Diner: Then and Now, “For example, all diners shipped to Florida went by rail.” 

Once a restaurant’s been in motion, it’s somehow not the same as a restaurant that’s fixed in place. Its relationship to space, time, and freedom is recast. You can feel it in any of the many greater Jacksonville restaurants that got their start on the road, regardless of whether it’s run like a food truck with indoor seating, as at K-Bop Korean Kitchen, or offers traditional table service, as is the case at Umami Curry. These standstill restaurants with nomadic pasts — and the tolerant, casual attitude those years generated— are today’s Sterling Streamliner diners.

Abstrakt only falters when it strays from that script. I’m still perplexed by the refrigerator-cold and under seasoned boiled egg wedges on a surprisingly drab spinach salad, and don’t know what to make of a coconut milk salmon that had the namby-pamby character of a church potluck contribution. While the fish was cooked correctly, $32 felt like a steep price to pay for dinner in a place where service is brusque, and if there’s beer or wine available — as the restaurant’s social media accounts imply — it’s not apparent to guests.

Better to savor Abstrakt’s accomplished chicken wings, fried hard and sugared lightly. Follow that sugar trail to dessert, one of Abstrakt’s great strengths. I was captivated by the rubbery, stylish funk of the ivory-toned cassava cake, rich with coconut and condensed milk. And I’m still fawning over the turon, or fried bundles of plantain, drizzled with caramel and presented with a scoop of ube ice cream. The pastry is crispy, jammy, and dazzling.

On a lonely night when you didn’t know what to do next, could you go to Abstrakt, order turon, and camp out unbothered for an hour or two? You could. You should.

Abstrakt Filipino Essence | 1500 Beach Blvd., Unit 215, Jacksonville Beach | 904-595-5048 | Tuesday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m., Friday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Sunday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. |
abstraktfillipinoessence.com

This review was produced in partnership with The Food Section, a James Beard award-winning newsletter covering food and drink across the American South.