Big Boi

Recipes kept in service

Recreating her mother’s recipes is the gesture Barb Batiste, Chef at Big Boi in Los Angeles, returns to. “What I enjoy most is recreating my mom’s recipes,” she says, giving the kitchen its measure. This is family food kept active through daily repetition, portion by portion, order by order. Batiste describes herself directly: “I am a self-taught chef and I am a baker.” At Big Boi, that training reads as practice learned close to home, with her mother, aunt and grandmother beside her when she was a child.

Big Boi opened in 2018 as her focused savory house after B Sweet, the catering company, dessert trucks and dessert bar that had already carried her baking into Los Angeles. The restaurant’s own language calls the cooking “Filipino food for everyone,” but the wider address does not flatten the source. Batiste frames the menu as her versions of Filipino classic recipes and childhood favorites. Her father, Angel, is present in the name: “Boi” was his nickname. The mark of the place, two capital Bs drawn into a heart, keeps that family line visible without needing to explain it at the register.

Lumpia as the anchor

The menu works in the grammar of comfort: chicken adobo, pork sisig, longanisa, pork tocino, lumpia in pork and plant-based forms. Lumpia carries particular weight here because it can stay itself while shifting for the table in front of it. The original pork version keeps the familiar crisp roll at the center; the plant-based version lets the same gesture travel without making the diner leave the pattern of the meal. The kitchen also moves between savory and sweet, with hot bread pudding and chocolate chip banana bread belonging to the same home-minded discipline as the rice plates and fried rolls.

There is a practical intelligence in the way Big Boi builds flavor for everyday eating. Filipino cooking’s sweet, salty and sour register sits behind the adobo reference, but Batiste does not present it as theory. She puts it into food that can be carried, shared, eaten at the counter, or brought back into a weekday. The butter jars belong to that same method. They are made for pan de sal, waffles, pancakes, toast and bagels, less a garnish than a pantry extension of the restaurant’s bench. Monthly specials give the kitchen room to move while the core stays legible.

The counter in Sawtelle Japantown

The room is small, lively and quick in the way counter service can be when the food has already earned trust. Sawtelle Japantown gives the place a Los Angeles rhythm: people arrive for a fast meal, but the cooking does not ask to be treated as fast work. Orders gather around dishes that feel familiar even when the diner is meeting them for the first time. The counter matters because it keeps the exchange direct. Batiste’s stated pleasure, “What I love still the most is just feeding people,” lands differently in a room built for everyday return.

Nothing about the setting asks the food to perform formality. The point is access without dilution, a casual room where family recipes can take on public life. Pork tocino, longanisa and lumpia sit comfortably in that frame, each one carrying the useful repetition of a dish made to be wanted again. The close work is in keeping those flavors clear through service, especially when the room is lively and the pass has no patience for ornament.

Inheritance made public

Batiste has said she is proud that it is her mother’s recipes she can share with everyone who comes in. That pride is at Big Boi. The house matters because it turns private inheritance into a public counter without sanding away the names attached to it: Barb Batiste, her mother, her aunt, her grandmother, and Angel, the “Boi” inside Big Boi.