Yelp's Top 100 Restaurants: Jacksonville Beach restaurant makes annual list for 2024

Gary T. Mills, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union
Updated ·2 min read

Less than a year after making its brick-and-mortar debut, a Jacksonville Beach restaurant has been named to Yelp’s Top 100 U.S. Restaurants for 2024.

Abstrakt Filipino Essence, located at 1500 Beach Blvd., is the only Northeast Florida restaurant to make Yelp’s annual list – and it’s just one of 13 from Florida on the list for 2024.

At No. 71, Yelp writes that “Chef Jojo Hernandez crushes the rumor that Filipino food is just lumpia.”

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At Abstrakt, Hernandez offers a menu of Filipino cuisine with a "twist," paying homage to his family meals at home but also introducing ingredients and cooking styles native to other world cuisines.

“I’m infusing all this flavor in my Filipino roots. That’s why I call my food 80/20. It’s 80 percent family recipes that I love to eat and then I put my 20 percent twist to it,” Hernandez, a founding member of Jax Filipino Chefs, told the Times-Union in late February 2023, when his restaurant opened.

Hernandez opened his restaurant just three years after introducing his Filipino cuisine concept with a food truck, regularly drawing lines of customers eager to try favorites lumpia, pancit, Chicken Tocino Bowl and Pork Belly Sisig Bowl.

According to Yelpers, menu favorites at Abstrakt include Crispy Pork Belly Adobo and desserts creamy Ube Cheesecake made with sweet purple yams, and Crispy Turon.

Abstrakt Filipino Essence is open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday; and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday.

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This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville's Abstrakt Filipino named to Yelp's Top 100 Restaurants