Starting March 5, diners will have another Filipino option in the neighborhood when FAM Hospitality brings the Austin-based Filipino restaurant OKO to Denver for a month-long residency at 1441 26th Street. The space had been operating as the group's farm-to-table tasting menu concept Koko Ni, which went on pause late last year. (Its former chef de cuisine, James Giznak, is now heading up the culinary program at Grow + Gather in Englewood.)
OKO opened in Texas in September 2024 in partnership with Trinity Concepts as an ode to the Filipino diaspora, with executive chef/co-owner Paul Qui incorporating Texas ingredients and the skills of Philippines-born, Bronx-raised co-founder and chef de cuisine Harold Villarosa.
Villarosa is an acclaimed chef whose previous work experience spans multiple Michelin-starred kitchens as well as various features in food media such as Bon Appétit, Vice's 'Munchies, and Food Network’s BBQ Brawl. He has a passion for community building as U.S. Culinary Ambassador for Denmark, the Bahamas and Romania, and he founded the Insurgo project, “a community collective focused on farm to table movements in low-income neighborhoods in New York City and around the world.”
The chef's contemporary interpretation of Filipino food is heavily influenced by his birthplace, Iloilo City, in the Visayas region, the midsection of the Philippines. He says, “It's a very seafood-forward area. I use that flavor profile in my cooking esthetics as part of my language for the dishes at the restaurant.”
Villarosa also challenges convention by exploring the use of spice in his recipes to bring the heat and balance out the sweet and sour flavors that are commonly associated with Filipino cuisine. “Those are kind of like my little touches," he notes. "I think people really enjoy it because sometimes they're looking for that extra punch.”
He takes risks with the menu in hopes that Filipino flavors transcend cultures and find an audience. For instance, OKO’s kare-kare, an oxtail dish made with peanut butter, is known within the Filipino community as a celebratory dish served during birthdays or holidays. Villarosa says Filipinos order it because of how infrequently they eat it, but even without that context of a special occasion, locals are surprisingly curious to experience the deep flavors of this peanut curry-like entree.
“They're really just enjoying the balance between the unctuousness of the really deep beef stock that we cook for three days, and then the oxtail that we cook for almost six hours," says Villarosa, who adds beef tongue, fall vegetables like acorn squash, eggplant, and green beans to round it out. “It’s one of our best selling items."
For the Denver residency, Villarosa has selected about eleven of OKO’s heavy-hitter items and will also run specials that pull in elements from Texas and lean into the regionality of Colorado for an à la carte, family-style experience. Villarosa says the crispy pata special, braised ham hocks with house-made mang tomas liver sauce, is a crowd-pleaser in Austin that guests won’t want to miss. “It's about two pounds of meat, braised for four hours and then fried right after, and served with some achiote butter, cabbage slaw and atchara, which is our house-made pickled papaya, carrots, mango and golden raisins," he notes.
Once the team is up and running, Villarosa will entrust day-to-day operations to chef Ryan Mitchell, who worked with FAM Hospitality around the time of the COVID pandemic and has recently worked at Cart-Driver in LoHi. In preparation for this engagement, Mitchell spent a week and a half in Texas with the OKO crew to better understand the menu and execute it properly. "The cooking part is the easy part," Villarosa says. "You can always make things taste good. But it all comes down to service and menu engineering so that service flows properly."
Harold Villarosa's birthplace in the Phillipines is a "very seafood-forward area."
Robert Jacob Lerma/@robertjacoblerma
As part of the festivities, Villarosa will also host a slew of featured guests, from personal friends to industry greats and local favorites such as Kendra Anderson (owner of the now-closed Bar Helix), Paolo Dungca (Hiraya), Raheem Sealey (global xxecutive chef of KYU & Drinking Pig BBQ), and Marcos Juarez (Hidden Omakase).
Villarosa is especially excited to welcome Dungca, his longtime friend, who was recently nominated as a 2025 James Beard Award semifinalist for Emerging Chef. The idea is that each chef will drop in and add specials to the menu. ”They'll come up with two or three dishes, and they'll be part of our team, part of the mix," Villarosa explains.
He adds that he is thrilled to see Filipino spots get the shine they deserve, and hints that this residency could be a peek at what’s to come. “I think I think the ownership team wanted us to come and just see what other markets work with this type of flavor profile and if Denver's ready for it," Villarosa says.
Through the OKO residency, Villarosa wants the public to stay hungry for diverse dining experiences, and he aims to expand people’s understanding of what Filipino food can be.
“People should just have an open mind and really just see Filipino food for what it is — a fusion of a lot of different countries from all over the Southeast Asian diaspora" — from Malaysia, China, Spain and beyond," he concludes. “There are a lot of layers to Filipino culture, and a lot of people don't see it. Hopefully, as storytellers, as chefs, we get to tell that story.”
OKO at Koko Ni is located at 1441 26th Street and will be open from 5 to 10:30 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday from March 5 to April 13. The menu is a la carte and seating is currently walk-in only. For more information, follow @kokonidenver on Instagram.
