Grace Park Dining by Margarita Forés

Produce carried across two kitchens

Margarita Forés sets Italian respect for produce beside Filipino farms as Chef at Grace Park Dining by Margarita Forés in Manilla, working from Rockwell Center with the confidence of someone who built several rooms before this one. Her path runs through Marymount School of New York, Mount Holyoke College, Assumption College San Lorenzo, a trainee post at Axona Holdings in Hong Kong from 1981, and time at Valentino's in New York, where fresh pasta and Italian cooking became part of her working language. She founded Cibo in 1997, then kept widening that language through Lusso, Alta, and Grace Park. At this station, the lineage is not a single teacher at the bench. It is the pull between Italian ingredient culture and Filipino agriculture, held close enough to become a method. Forés has described the connection plainly: “My time in Italy taught me the deep respect Italians have for their ingredients. This inspired me to rediscover and appreciate our own Filipino produce, leading me to celebrate Filipino farmers and ingredients in Grace Park.” Grace Park opened in 2013, after a period of recovery that sharpened her insistence on organic sourcing. The room carries that decision into the menu without making a lecture of it.

Adobo, pasta, and the farm basket

The program works à la carte, with comfort as the frame and local sourcing as the discipline. Lamb adobo arrives on butter-garlic organic brown rice; oxtail kansi leans on batwan fruit and savory spice; Negros organic lechon brings local beer into the cooking and meets frutta di mostarda with red wine liver sauce. The Italian side of the bench does not sit apart from that Filipino base. Mezzi rigatoni can carry scallops, asparagus, and Alaminos taba ng talangka; pappardelle may take duck ragu, cream, truffle, and salted egg. Off-menu pastas such as aglio olio, vongole, and limone keep the house close to the simpler grammar Forés brought home from Italy, then adjust it through local ingredients. The blackboard gives the kitchen room for truffle arrivals, fresh seafood, soups, and vegetable work. Slow-cooked beef belly with muscovado glaze shows the place at its clearest, sweetness used as seasoning rather than decoration, with roasted potatoes and greens doing the quieter work beside it. The wine program is curated rather than declarative, built to sit with pasta, oysters, adobo, lechon, and rice bowls instead of pulling the room toward ceremony.

A room made to feel lived in

The room at One Rockwell chooses age over polish: weathered tables, vintage glasses, ceilings that make the space feel closer to an old house than a designed dining room. That matters because the food asks for ease. Grace Park is upscale casual, but the service style leaves room for families, couples, travelers, and regulars to settle into the counterpoint of pasta and rice, truffle and batwan, Pecorino and local beer. The noise stays conversational. The pass can send out cauliflower clam chowder, field mushrooms with Asiago cream, chicken parmigiana, lamb adobo, and a tropical Pavlova without forcing them into a single national argument. They sit together because Forés has made the ingredient, not the category, the point. In Rockwell Center, where polish can flatten a room, Grace Park keeps the feeling of a house with a working kitchen attached.

The measure left on the table

Grace Park was ranked 12th on Opinionated About Dining's Top Casual Restaurants in Asia in 2024, and Forés was named Asia's Best Female Chef by Asia's 50 Best Restaurants in 2016. Those numbers belong here only because the work on the plate already explains them. Job's tears, Alaminos taba ng talangka, batwan, Negros lechon, and the butter-garlic organic brown rice under the lamb adobo show Filipino produce in a kitchen shaped by Italian training.