Chad Valencia

Chad Valencia’s cooking is shaped by formal training and city apprenticeship, combining a technical base with the local context that informs ingredients, communities, appetite, and pace. At Le Cordon Bleu, Pasadena and LASA, he developed structure and precision while staying close to the food’s surroundings. Work across Los Angeles kitchens added speed, repetition, and the practical grammar of service. In roles at Sqirl and Canale, he learned to make technique responsive, balancing brightness and richness and keeping food immediate on the plate.

Produce, acidity, smoke, and texture became central tools. Valencia’s work took clearer shape at LASA in Los Angeles Chinatown, where he was co-owner and executive chef until 2021. There, Filipino flavor, family memory, and California kitchen habits came together in a restaurant language that carried inheritance into service without reducing it to nostalgia. Since 2021, he has been business operator at Lasita in Los Angeles, continuing a cooking style built from adaptation as much as origin.

His food is best understood as Filipino-American, drawing from Pampangan family memories and Californian kitchen experience without treating those references as separate categories. Acidity, smoke, cure, fruit, and family history function as parts of the same build. The results are bright without becoming thin, and remembered without becoming fixed. Red Snapper Kinilaw with Asian pear, calamansi, purple daikon, and black radish shows that balance clearly.

Raw fish, citrus, crisp fruit, and radish create a dish built on freshness, edge, and contrast. Egg Noodles with calamansi butter and fish sauce-cured egg yolk works from another angle, using butter for roundness, cured yolk and fish sauce for salinity, and calamansi for lift. Across the work, brightness and depth remain the recurring tools. Valencia’s cooking is not simply a translation of inherited dishes, and it is not a break from them.

It is a city-shaped expression of Filipino cooking made through place, labor, and remembered flavor. He has described the balance as being equal parts Filipino and Californian, a combination of nostalgia and growing up working in California kitchens. That balance gives the food its texture, keeping memory active while allowing California to serve as the terrain through which the cooking is made. His signature dishes include Red Snapper Kinilaw with Asian pear, Chicken inasal, and pork belly lechon.

Plate Magazine named him Chefs to Watch in 2018. StarChefs featured Red Snapper Kinilaw with Asian pear, calamansi, purple daikon, and black radish, as well as Egg Noodles with calamansi butter and fish sauce-cured egg yolk, at LASA. During the pandemic, repeat customers and strong response to Chicken inasal and pork belly lechon helped guide a menu change at Lasita, reflecting a style that remains personal, rooted, and shaped by Los Angeles.