Dining
Happy Ongpauco-Tiu
Restaurateur, Happy Concept Group
Happy Ongpauco-Tiu's culinary journey is deeply rooted in her family's love for cooking and deep connection to Filipino food. With the kitchen and their family restaurant, Barrio Fiesta, serving as her playground growing up, she developed an early appreciation for good food. This inspired her to follow in the footsteps of her father and grandmother and build a career in the culinary industry. For Happy, inspiration comes from the home, and recreating the feeling of being at home through food is an integral part of her entrepreneurial endeavors. Inspired by the concept of "pamana" (heritage), her ultimate goal as a chef and restaurateur is to bring people together through nostalgic dishes that evoke the taste and warmth of home. Guided by her family's approach to cooking, Happy ensures the dishes she serves are as hearty as she remembers them to be. Happy believes serving food prepared from the heart is and will always be the core of her purpose.
Crafting lifelong memories in the kitchen
Making delightful memories in the kitchen and around the dining table is something Happy Ongpauco-Tiu and her family value. They harness the power of food to foster conversations and strengthen relationships.
“We would all cook together and the kitchen would be our favorite happy place in our home.”
As a child, Happy fondly recalls the tradition of gathering with her family every Sunday in her grandmother's spacious kitchen. They would bond over their cherished recipes, like her lola’s classic humba and kare-kare, or her dad's signature invention, crispy pata. With her clan setting the perfect example, Happy knows that the kitchen being the heart of the home is the not-so-secret ingredient to bringing her, her husband, and their kids closer. This is why she continues to instill the value of traditional Sunday family gatherings in her own family.
Flavors in Focus: Precision Cooking with Wolf
Happy Ongpauco-Tiu comes from a family of restaurateurs. She upholds their legacy through her restaurants, developing her own standards for culinary excellence and elevated dining experiences over the years. Now a well-known and well-loved chef and restaurateur, this tastemaker has also established the Happy Concept Group which specializes in private dining. Through her business ventures, she shares the recipes she inherited and tweaked with her own flavors.
Happy, who develops her restaurant's menu items in her home kitchen, says her Wolf appliance is one of her most used kitchen equipment yet its performance stays exceptional even after 12 years. Built to last, Wolf appliances are known for precision cooking that helps bring out the flavor in every ingredient.
For those who seek excellence in the kitchen, Wolf offers a range of products engineered to meet the highest standards. The Wolf induction cooktop, in particular, features instantaneous temperature adjustment. No heat is wasted, as energy is supplied directly to the cookware. With a touch of the controls, Boost Mode provides high heat for rapid sears and boils, while True Melt offers gentle, low heat for delicate ingredients like chocolate, ensuring they won't burn even if left on the pan for hours. Imagine the possibilities with such precision cooking at your fingertips.
