Finding Marie’s Kitchen the first time involves a little faith. The restaurant sits at 11910 Greenville Ave., inside a building called Forest Green that mostly houses medical offices and small businesses, with no sign visible from the parking lot. Regulars describe walking in through the main doors, catching the smell before they catch the restaurant itself, and following it down a hallway to Suite 103. It has become part of the restaurant’s identity rather than a flaw. People find Marie’s Kitchen because someone told them to, not because they drove past it.
Marie and Jay Gerson opened the restaurant in 2019 after moving from San Francisco, originally built around American deli lunches, sandwiches and salads for the office crowd upstairs. The Filipino breakfast menu came shortly after, almost as an addition, and it’s the reason people now drive across the city to find a restaurant with no exterior signage. Marie runs the kitchen. Jay handles the front of house and the register. It survived the pandemic on a menu built mostly for people who already worked in the building, which says something about how good the food had to be to expand past that.
The centerpiece of the menu is silog, and it’s worth explaining for anyone who hasn’t ordered Filipino breakfast before. Silog isn’t one dish. It’s a format: garlic fried rice, a fried egg, and a protein, and the name itself is a mashup of sinangag, the garlic rice, and itlog, the egg. Marie’s Kitchen runs close to a dozen versions. Tapsilog uses thin, marinated, slightly cured steak, and it’s what the owners point first-timers toward. Tocilog swaps in sweet cured pork belly, Longsilog uses longganisa, a Filipino sausage with a flavor closer to chorizo than anything typically found at an American breakfast table, and Bangsilog is built on fried milkfish, bones and all, which takes some getting used to and rewards the people who do.
There’s also Spamsilog, pan-fried Spam over rice, a dish that makes complete sense once you know Spam has been a genuine pantry staple across the Philippines since American troops brought it over during World War II, not an ironic choice on a menu but a real one.
Past the silog list, the daily specials are where Marie’s Kitchen gets more adventurous, rotating through dishes tied to different regions across the more than 7,000 islands that make up the Philippines. Dinuguan is a pork stew built on a rich, dark broth thickened with pork blood and vinegar, a dish that tends to intimidate first-timers by description and win them over by the first bite, savory and tangy rather than heavy. Humbâ, a braised pork belly dish from the Visayan Islands where Marie is from, cooks low and slow with soy sauce, vinegar, and bay leaf until the meat falls apart on its own. Bicol Express, despite the name, has nothing to do with trains. It’s a pork dish simmered in coconut milk and chili, named for the express train route through the Bicol region known for its love of heat, and it shows up spicy enough to justify the name.
Kare-Kare, an oxtail and vegetable stew built on a thick peanut sauce and traditionally served with a side of fermented shrimp paste called bagoong, is the closest thing on the menu to a Filipino answer to Texas oxtail, and Lechon Kawali, pork belly deep-fried until the skin turns to shattering cracklin, is the dish most likely to convert a skeptic on sight alone.
Dessert leans just as unfamiliar and just as worth trying. The Ube Pancakes get their purple color from ube, a Filipino purple yam with a flavor closer to vanilla and pistachio than anything resembling a regular sweet potato, and the ube sauce poured over them has become the single most photographed item on the menu. Halo-Halo, which translates to “mix-mix,” is a shaved ice dessert built from coconut jelly, sweet jackfruit, ube halaya, leche flan, and sweet mung beans, topped with a scoop of ube ice cream, meant to be stirred together into one chaotic, genuinely delicious bite rather than eaten in tidy layers. And Lumpia, the Filipino answer to a spring roll, comes fried to order with a crackling shell around a well-seasoned pork filling, small enough that ordering a second round rarely feels like a mistake.
For anyone who wants something closer to familiar territory, the deli side of the menu is still fully intact: a Reuben built on corned beef and sauerkraut, a classic BLT, and a BLT Chop Chop Salad with a choice of dressing. It’s a strange, effective split menu, American lunch counter on one side and a genuine regional tour of the Philippines on the other, and the fact that both halves work equally well is the clearest sign of how seriously Marie takes both jobs.
Marie’s Kitchen is open 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sunday, closed Saturdays. It’s worth calling ahead at (972) 234-8383 if there’s a specific daily special in mind, since those rotate and don’t always repeat the following week.
