More online
www.thecaterer.com
M
any undergraduate courses have a prac- tical element to them, but Florence Mae Maglanoc is surely the only per-
son in the UK who has made opening a res- taurant count towards her final degree. When her partner, Omar Shah, asked her to help him open a Filipino ice-cream shop in Kentish Town in north London in 2017, Mae persuaded her tutors to allow the strategy and branding behind what would become Mamasons to be the major project of her finals. Maglanoc and Shah, however, have never followed convention. Shah at the time was best known for Bin-
tang, the pan-Asian restaurant his parents opened in 1997, as well as the Latin-Caribbean Guanabana next door. The couple became so well-established in Kentish Town, where they also live, that any landlords looking for a relia- ble tenant would approach Shah and Maglanoc first. Last November, however, marked a decisive shift for the couple and their Mag- inhawa Group with the opening of Donia, a contemporary Filipino restaurant on the Kingly Court site formerly occupied by Imad’s Syrian Kitchen and Asma Khan’s Darjeeling Express. There had been no long-term plan to open
Donia; Maglanoc had been looking for a Soho site for their Filipino bakery Panadera, and Kingly Court was pushing for a West End outpost of Bintang. “Our method has always been to visit a site
and envision what we can do with the space,” Maglanoc explains. “It’s a bit of a reverse engineer process to having an existing brand and finding somewhere to place it. Instead we think, what’s missing, what’s needed? I’d always thought that if we were going to introduce another concept, it would have to be for a special site like this.” Filipino food, to many Londoners, remains
an unknown quantity. What, then, was the approach to Donia’s menu? “Keeping things as simple as possible with the best technique,” Maglanoc says. “I try and think about Filipino food in a way that I would be able to explain it to non-Filipinos.” How, then, would she explain the fundamentals of the cuisine? “It’s very punchy. There are a lot of stews, a lot of sauces and a lot of influences from different places.” Most Filipinos in London know their food her-
itage from their communities, which, Maglanoc says, has meant they have been unwilling to spend money in restaurants on what they perceive as home cooking. But younger, Brit- ish-born Filipinos have also been exposed to the melting pot of UK British food culture. “I love Filipino food,” Maglanoc says. “But
I love a good pie and mash too.” Both come together on Donia’s menu as a lamb shoul- der caldereta pie, in which a chilli-spiced meat stew is contained in a golden dome of perfectly executed shortcrust pastry.
Perfect timing The opening of Donia has been a recent rare bright spot for Filipino food in the UK. It was announced in January that Romulo Café in Kensington, the first international outpost of the Manila-based Romulo restaurant group, had closed after eight years of trading. Jollibee, the fried chicken chain that opened in nearby Earl’s Court in 2018 and is ploughing ahead with UK expansion, has seen its losses widen from £4m in 2021 to £6.5m in 2022. Why has Filipino food yet to take off in this country? “The southeast Asian market has a lot to compete with, right?” Shah says. “I’ve been in the restaurant business since I was 12 years old. My dad is Bangladeshi and my mum is Filipino, but Bintang was originally a
Prawn and pork dumplings, white crab
www.thecaterer.com 26 January 2024 | The Caterer | 17
▲
PHOTO: LAURIE FLETCHER
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48
