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This Is Where It All Began
I was born in the province of Diatagon, Surigao del Sur, in Mindanao, Philippines. We lived in a small wooden hut, tucked right against the mountainside. It wasn't much, but it was a home filled with love and happy memories. My father worked in logging, and my mother took care of everything else; cooking, at the same time sewing curtains and table covers by hand, the old-fashioned way as a side business. We grew bananas and whatever else the land would give us. When the harvest was good, we ate well; whatever was left over, we sold so we could buy rice and other daily necessities. Some days our whole meal was just rice with a bit of brown sugar, or rice with soy sauce and oil when there was nothing else. We moved often, wherever there was a way to make a living. It wasn't an easy life, but I remember it as a happy childhood, because we always worked through it together, as a family.
I was fourteen years old when I cooked for the first time. I didn't know anything back then. My mother taught me the way she'd learned, not by showing me, but by instructing me. She'd describe what to do, and I'd go and figure it out myself in the kitchen. My first dish was paksiw na isda or fried fish in vinegar. It came out just right. It actually became my wife's favorite when I first cooked it for her. It's a quick and easy seafood dish that is said to be one of the common every day dishes prepared by Filipino families.
It was later, when I moved to Cebu, that cooking really became part of me. My older cousins ran a small carinderia that fed the construction workers at the National Power Corporation. My cousin, still single at the time; handled the customers, and I spent my days just watching how she cooked. Day after day, I'd watch, ask questions, and slowly the techniques started to stick. That carinderia is where my love for cooking truly began.
Where I come from, it was usually the women who cooked for the family, that was just how it was. But I found something in it that I couldn't let go of. Growing up with very little taught me that cooking wasn't only about putting food on the table. It could also become a way to make a living. As I watched people work hard every day just to support their families, I realized cooking was something I truly enjoyed, loved, and could build a future with. Over the years, it became my passion.
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Why I Cook
I cook for my family, first and always. Whenever someone eats what I've made, I can't help but ask: is it good? Their answer matters to me more than almost anything. It's how I know whether I've done right by them, and honestly, it's how I know I've done right by myself too. I believe cooking is something everyone should carry with them. It's a skill you build for your future, so that one day, you can cook for your own family and pass it down to your children the way it was passed down to me.
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Bringing Filipino Food to Canada
I wanted to bring Filipino food here because I wanted to share what I know how to do, and let people taste what real Filipino cooking is like. For the Filipinos who eat our food, I want them to feel like apiece of home traveled here with us, something they can come back towhenever they're missing the Philippines. And for everyone else, I hope our food gives them a reason to want to visit, to taste even more of what our country has to offer. My dream for this business has always been simple: to grow it into something my whole family can be part of. To work alongside my wife and my children, instead of each of us working for someone else. To finally be your own boss, running something that's truly yours.
What Family Means to Us
The values my parents raised me with were simple: work hard, takecare of what you have, and always have a plan for your future. Neverstop having ambitions.To me, family means love, and it means life itself. Every year, welook forward to Sinulog and to Christmas most of all, the onecelebration in the Philippines where the entire family gatherstogether, no matter how far apart we've drifted the rest of the year.That's the feeling we hope to bring to the table with every dish weserve, that sense of everyone gathered, together.
The Food
Some of my favorite dishes to cook are Hamonada and Humba, bothrecipes passed down from my mother, the Humba also carries touches from my mother-in-law, Shirley. Pancit, on the other hand, I taught myself over the years.The dishes our family and customers request most often are Spaghetti, Pancit, and Ginaling na Kalabasa. That last one holds a special place for us, our youngest daughter Jasmin learned to cook it when she was just fourteen, the very same age I was when I first picked up a ladle myself. And of course, there are the recipes that came before all of us, like my mother's Pork Hamonada, still made the same way today.Not every memory in the kitchen has been graceful. I've burned my hand grilling pork over hot coals, and I've cried real tears over a pot of spaghetti, not because it moved me, but because somebody (me) got a little too ambitious with the onions. Lol! Cooking has given us plenty to laugh about too, burns, tears, and all.At the end of the day, every dish we serve carries a piece of where we came from, the mountains of Mindanao, the small carinderia in Cebu, and a kitchen table in Canada where the whole family still gathers. That's what we hope you taste when you eat with us: not just the food, but the love behind it. We hope you taste home.
