LOCATED ALONG PIONEER STREET IN MANDALUYONG IS THE LEGEND VILLAS, A BOUTIQUE HOTEL THAT RESEMBLES FILIPINO ANCESTRAL HOMES AND ONE THAT PRIDES ITSELF ON TREATING ITS GUESTS TO TRADITIONAL FILIPINO HOSPITALITY.
Within this hotel lies Lola Maria, a Filipino restaurant that focuses on preparing and serving traditional local dishes. “The restaurant mainly serves Filipino comfort food,” says Ginger King-Villavicencio, the hotel’s General Manager. “We try as much as possible to stick to the traditional way of cooking... We meticulously pick out ingredients. We make sure that our ingredients are fresh and we even go to the extent of laboriously preparing them because a lot of Filipino dishes are quite tedious to make. In fact, a lot of our patrons would say that the reason why they like eating here is because they like a certain dish that they cannot prepare anymore at home because it would be too tedious to prepare.”
The restaurant was named after Ginger’s maternal great-grandmother, Doña Maria Villanueva Rosario, who lived in Vigan. “She was very business-minded but she always made time for her family,” Ginger says. This is also why the restaurant is fashioned after an ancestral house, so that guests feel that they are visiting a favorite relative, one who will fill their souls as well as their bellies.
Most of Lola Maria’s dishes are made from traditional recipes passed on by friends, some of them celebrities. “The reason we wanted to offer Filipino dishes is because there (is a lack of) good Filipino restaurants out there,” Ginger says.
