Cha Gio: An enduring romance with food
Viet-Filipina Leilani Valido-Castillo’s childhood memo-ries are filled with the uncanny mixture of food and war.
Her mother, Ba Lan, and grandmother, Ba Thao, spent a good deal of time escaping armed conflicts—the Vietnam Wars and the Pathet Lao takeover of Laos. But at peace time, their livelihood revolved around cooking, selling food, and operating a restaurant where they have built a name for themselves.
It is this enduring romance with food and cooking that prompted her in putting up Cha Gio Café Restaurant, Manila’s only Vietnamese café two years ago.
“My venture into the food business was brought about by my passion for cooking which I inherited from my elders, as well as my desire to rediscover my Vietnamese roots,” she said, having been assimilated into Philippine culture for over three decades.
Castillo was born in the Laotian capital of Vientiane as Nguyen Thuy Hang to a Vietnamese mother and a Filipino father. During her leisure time, she cooks native dishes to enhance her Indo-Chinese heritage.
The head of a management consulting firm at the Ramon Magsaysay Center in Malate, she established the restaurant because of the dearth of decent and affordable dining places in the vicinity.
Cha Gio offers a wide array of noodle toppings, banh mi (sandwich), omelets, soups, rice toppings and the pho or the hot noodle soup. Set meals with drinks are priced below P 100.00, making it a daily lunch fare for employees, executives, and tourists alike.
Cha gio (spring rolls), the house specialty, is very much like the Filipino lumpia, but is wrapped once again in lettuce leaves with cucumber, basil leaves and dipped in nuoc mam sauce. Available in pork, beef and chicken flavors, they can be had in 20-piece and 40-piece packs.
She has managed to integrate into her menu Filipino dishes such as pork and bangus sinigang, beef steak, and sinigang sa miso, to name a few. She also serves Thai dishes such as pandan chicken and tom yum goong soup and French-influenced dishes.
At any given day, the café is bursting with employees from the Land Bank head office, the Manila Diamond Hotel, and the Hyatt Casino Hotel.
“Our food is mostly the same ones we enjoyed back home, while the rest are the ones we developed for the market,” she enthuses.
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