The Verdict
In a city that has rapidly accumulated fine dining credentials — nine Michelin stars, multiple Asia's 50 Best entries, a generation of chefs trained in the world's best kitchens — Toyo Eatery occupies a singular position. It is simultaneously the most decorated restaurant in the Philippines and the one that most clearly articulates what Filipino cuisine actually is: communal, generous, rooted in the act of sharing, and built on ingredients that the archipelago has been cultivating for centuries. Six years in a row as the best restaurant in the Philippines. Asia's 50 Best Hospitality Award in 2025. One Michelin Star. The credentials are extraordinary. The experience is better.
Chef Jordy Navarra opened Toyo Eatery in 2018 at Karrivin Plaza — a converted compound off Chino Roces Avenue in Makati that has since become the epicentre of Manila's dining renaissance. The restaurant occupies a double-height space with an open kitchen visible from every seat, concrete floors, handcrafted acacia wood tables, and rattan chairs that place you immediately in the sensory register of the Philippines. The capiz lamps. The bamboo and wood details. The warm, particular light that makes everything look like a memory.
The menu exists in two forms. The tasting menu — currently priced at ₱6,500 — moves through eight courses of Chef Navarra's most considered seasonal thinking. The Kamayan, at ₱3,900 per person, is the one you should know about before you come. It is a communal feast served on banana leaves, eaten entirely with your hands in the manner of traditional Filipino salu-salo — the gathering where everyone reaches across the table, pulls apart the fish with their fingers, scoops up the rice, and lets the meal become an act of shared pleasure rather than individual performance.
The Kamayan Feast
The Kamayan is not a gimmick. It is a genuine argument about how food creates intimacy. When you remove cutlery from a table at a restaurant of this calibre — when the natural reserve that fine dining often enforces dissolves into laughter and passed dishes and hands moving across a shared surface — something happens between people that a conventional table service cannot replicate. This is why Toyo Eatery works as a first date, as a birthday, as the dinner that ends a successful project. It makes strangers into friends and friends into something closer.
The food itself is exceptional by any measure. Navarra treats Filipino ingredients — native vinegars, regional rice varieties, tropical seafood, the full aromatic vocabulary of Southeast Asian cooking — with the precision and restraint of a chef trained at the highest international level. His signature dishes shift with the seasons, but the commitment to local sourcing and to expressing Filipino culinary identity is absolute. Nothing here is fusion for its own sake. Everything tastes specifically, recognisably, beautifully Filipino.
Why It Works for Every Social Occasion
For a first date, Toyo Eatery solves the most common problem of early-stage dining: what to talk about. The Kamayan format provides endless conversation — the food arrives in waves, requires negotiation and sharing, and generates the kind of light physical contact (reaching for the same dish, passing food across the table) that is entirely appropriate and genuinely connective. You will not stare at your phone at Toyo Eatery.
For a birthday, the restaurant's exuberant hospitality — the team's warmth is itself Michelin-noted — and the celebratory nature of the Kamayan feast make this the most natural choice in Manila. For a team dinner, the communal format works beautifully: the shared experience of eating together with your hands is the best possible team-building activity that doesn't involve anyone saying "team-building activity".
Also in Manila's Karrivin Cluster
Karrivin Plaza contains three of Manila's most exciting restaurants within a single compound. Inatô — eight counter seats, one Michelin Star — is the most intimate option for solo diners or couples who want to watch a chef work in real time. Metiz is the fermentation laboratory of the trio, building tasting menus around Filipino vinegar culture and aged ingredients. For the full Manila picture, see Helm at Ayala Triangle — the Philippines' only Two-Star — and Gallery by Chele in BGC for the most romantic view in the city.