Recently, loyal patrons, friends and food enthusiasts gathered in a rare show of fan appreciation celebrating 20 years of a leading Filipino-Spanish fusion restaurant with a patio (or garden-style) setting.
It was 20 years ago when then mortgage broker owner/founder Tito Gonzales invited friends Johan Yuson and Bambi Fernando to open a Filipino restaurant that would serve as a regular meeting place for people to discuss and close business deals.
Gonzales noticed then that there were mostly only turo-turo style eateries offering Filipino dishes in San Bruno and the rest were too far from where they conduct business deals.
“It was timely that this formerly Mediterranean restaurant was available for us to take over and purchase and that led to the opening of Patio Filipino. I named it Patio Filipino because the place has an open-air patio the former owners used for hookahs or pipes for smoking tobacco,” Gonzales revealed. “At the start I borrowed an executive chef straight from Casa Armas in the Philippines who (was a) Spanish food (expert). That is why from the start we already had Spanish and Filipino dishes here.”
Asked about the restaurant’s longevity and ranking among Filipino food enthusiasts, Gonzales cited Patio Filipino’s core value of kindness in customer service.
“Treat people the way you want to be treated. That is how I define kindness. The customers can see if you are sincere on how you treat them,” Gonzales said. “And even (we) owners practice that basic value of kindness (with) our staff, like they are real family which in turn breeds loyalty from them,” Gonzales pointed out. “Consistency is also very important on how dishes are prepared and cooked.”
Gonzales made special mention the blessing they had during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic when they remained actively open and the county even called on them to “provide food for the community of seniors/elders who were helpless in fending for themselves even as our facility staff’s mobility was hampered. Other establishments found it hard to survive and many of them closed during that period.”
“Before the pandemic, at around 2015, Savor Magazine of New York voted ours as the best crispy pata in the US and Patio Filipino was also rated one of the top five Filipino restaurants in the whole state of California by a prestigious food magazine. These are our achievements in the last 20 years.”
At the celebration, Councilor Flor Nicolas presented a recognition from the South San Francisco City Council citing Patio’s two decades of serving luscious Filipino-Spanish fusion cuisine and creating memories. It was unanimously signed by all members of the city council.
