Paolo Dungca

Beginnings

Dungca’s cooking is rooted in the dishes he grew up with, yet he approaches them less like heirlooms to be preserved under glass than living forms to be reworked at the pass. The result is playful without being careless, and cheffed-up without losing the heartbeat of the original. His own way of speaking about food suggests a childhood in which Filipino and American cuisines were not blurred together after the fact, but understood from the beginning as distinct, legible categories. “I never really experienced a shift.” He has also said, “I was old enough to understand the difference between Filipino and American cuisines.” There is a plainness to those lines that feels revealing: food was not something he had to discover, recover, or decode later in life. Nor did that awareness come from deprivation. In a remark that places abundance at the center of his early food memory, he said, “There are numerous Filipino joints in Los Angeles so I never really felt deprived.” That sense of availability seems to have shaped a chef for whom Filipino food is not a project of compensation, but a field of motion. His work reads as momentum—familiar flavors carried forward with a cook’s instinct for structure, surprise, and wit.

The Rise

In 2019, he was chef at ABC Pony. Pogiboy matters in the sequence because it marks a step beyond the stove and into ownership, a move that changes the meaning of the work as much as the work itself. It suggests not only command in the kitchen, but a stake in the larger shape of the dining room, the identity, and the long-term voice of the concept.

Today

The cooking there is Progressive Filipino cuisine, built around the same impulse that has followed Dungca across the arc of his career: take the dishes he grew up with and make them sharper, more playful, and more technically charged, without sanding away their roots. The food feels calibrated for the present, but it carries a clear line back to memory. The Tocino Burgers are the compact emblem of that approach. They fold a Filipino flavor reference into a format that reads instantly, then reveal more as they linger—an example of how Dungca likes to make the familiar feel newly considered. At this stage, the career’s momentum is not a departure from Filipino food, but a deeper run into it: from childhood understanding to professional expression to ownership, with the work now gathered under one roof in the capital.

Signature

Paolo's signature dishes include Ensaymada, Tocino Burgers, Ube Buns, and Makulay latte.

In Their Words “I was old enough to understand the difference between Filipino and American cuisines.” “I never really experienced a shift.”