Chicken asado mami, a Filipino noodle soup, served at the newly reopened Ling Nam in Daly City.

After a nearly two-year closure, Daly City Filipino institution Ling Nam is back.

The beloved restaurant has reopened in a new home, at 980 King Drive Plaza in Daly City, about a mile away from the original location on Gellert Boulevard. Longtime customers poured into a soft opening on Saturday, many requesting favorite dishes they had been missing, said Alexson Lim, whose father, Tony Lim, started the business in 1990.

They didn’t change the menu, though they’re starting with a smaller number of dishes as they get settled, Lim said. The Ling Nam kitchen is again serving the popular mami, noodle soups with shredded chicken, asado or beef, as well as siopao, enormous, fluffy steamed buns filled with pork.

Customers asking for bola bola, a sausage and egg version of siopao, and siomai dumplings, will have to wait until they expand the menu. Breakfast staples like silog, sisig and lechon kawali, the deep fried pork belly dish that’s served with rice here, are available all day. For dessert, look for halo halo and taho with sago, silken tofu layered with tapioca pearls and brown sugar syrup.

Ling Nam is open daily for indoor dining and takeout from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. It will eventually open at 7 a.m. The Lim family, which is Chinese and lived in the Philippines, decorated the dining room with photographs of the entrance to Chinatown in Manila, where the original Ling Nam restaurant is located. On a back wall hangs a large, framed collage of faded photos of Tony Lim with Filipino celebrities eating at the former Daly City restaurant.

Photos of the Filipino-Chinese Friendship Arch at the entrance to Manila’s Chinatown decorate the new Ling Nam dining room in Daly City.

The excitement about Ling Nam’s return is palpable. Dozens of people shared a post in a Facebook group for the NorCal Kababayan Community Group Corporation, a local Filipino nonprofit organization. “Their food is still delicious,” the poster wrote.

The homey restaurant long served as a hub for the Bay Area Filipino community and was part of the vibrant Filipino food scene in Daly City. After the lease on the Gellert Boulevard space ended, the Lim family searched for a new location. They reopened an outpost of the popular Starbread Bakery at the Daly City strip mall last year — where diners can stop in next door for boxes of warm señorita bread — but the restaurant took longer.

At Saturday’s soft opening, Alexson Lim recognized some customers he hadn’t seen for 20 years.

It’s a “new location, but time has not passed,” he said. “My dad made a comment, saying, ‘This was my purpose.’”

Elena Kadvany is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: elena.kadvany@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ekadvany

Elena Kadvany joined The San Francisco Chronicle as a food reporter in 2021. Previously, she was a staff writer at the Palo Alto Weekly and its sister publications, where she covered restaurants and education and also founded the Peninsula Foodist restaurant column and newsletter.