Chef Paolo Dungca already launched one major comeback last year. Now, he’s leading another.  After Kayu, his modern Filipino restaurant, closed on H Street, he quickly found a new home for it in Dupont Circle. Starting this Saturday, Dungca and his team have done the same for Hiraya, the cafe con cept they formerly ran for daytime service at the original Kayu.  It’s now called Morena, and it specializes in “Filipino-ish” rice bowls. It will start as a pop-up this Saturday, running from 9 AM to 3 PM. “Every guest coming in for dinner was asking if we were going to bring back an iteration of the cafe,” Dungca says. “And the staff kind of missed serving the breakfast aspect of what we were doing on H Street.” The food offerings are centered on rice bowls which are inspired by Filipino silog breakfasts— garlic rice, fried egg, and a protein. At Morena, they consist of garlic-turmeric Java rice topped with egg, green papaya pickle, and your choice of smoked pork longganisa sausage, banana-ketchup-glazed barbecue beef short ribs, burnt coconut chicken, or tofu-mushroom sisig. Morena’s bilo bilo matcha, with chewy rice balls and jackfruit. Photograph by Rey Lopez. Morena will also serve a more elaborate variety of cafe drinks than Hiraya did, like a bibingka latte, an ube horchata latte, and a bilo bilo matcha with chewy rice balls and jackfruit. Morena, which means “brown-skinned” in Spanish, is a term used often in the Philippines along with the Tagalog word “kayumanggi” to refer to the skin tone of Filipinos. It’s a symbol of cultural pride that inspired Dungca’s name for “Kayu.”   The pop-up will be open from 9 AM to 3 PM on Saturdays and Sundays only for the first few months, before dinner service begins at 5 PM. By July, Dungca hopes to kick off full-fledged daytime service Tuesday through Sunday. The post A New Daytime Rice Bowl Pop-Up Is Opening at Kayu first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less