SONNY AGCOLICOL and HENRY REVILLA: Due to customer demand, the pair turned their restaurant on its head.

What do contractors know about the restaurant business? This might be what came to mind among their acquaintances when Sonny Agcolicol and Henry Revilla started putting up a restaurant, Kubong Sawali, in Baguio City in 2003.

"Mahina kasi ang mga projects noon," explains Revilla. "Hindi panghabambuhay ang construction business [Projects were infrequent then and we realized that the construction business was not a lifetime thing], so we decided to diversify," says Revilla.

Agcolicol and Revilla, long-time business partners and friends who both happened to love to cook, invested in the restaurant their combined savings from running GEMS, a construction and supply store, for seven years. Agcolicol is a business economics graduate from the University of the Philippines and Revilla an architecture graduate from Saint Louis University in Baguio City.

They built the restaurant on an empty lot they had earlier leased along the stretch of Military Cut-Off Road in Baguio City, near the Baguio General Hospital, then decided to serve Ilocano dishes. "During that time," Revilla recalls, "there were no Filipino restaurants in Baguio with a native ambience. The choices were all international: Japanese, Chinese, or European."

Some of their friends had suggested that their prospective location for the restaurant would be bad for business, for it was far from Baguio's central business district encompassed by Session Road, Burnham Park, and Baguio City Hall. The partners didn't listen to the naysayers, though. "We took it as a challenge and just followed our gut-feel," Revilla says.  

Being in the construction business, the partners had no trouble at all in designing and building the restaurant as well as in sourcing supplies for it. In keeping with the name and theme they had chosen for the restaurant, they used predominantly native materials for its construction and decor: kawayan (bamboo poles), sawali (bamboo slats), and banig (buri mat).

Agcolicol and Revilla did not even hire a manager for the restaurant when they first opened it. What's more, the two did the cooking themselves. Recalls Revilla: "Kami ang nagluluto, nag-iihaw, at pati dishwashing kami rin! [We would do the cooking, the broiling, and even the dishwashing ourselves!]"

To their disappointment, however, the restaurant was initially unable to attract the target market that they had in mind. They had conceptualized it as a turo-turo (literally, point-point) fastfood for students from the nearby university campus and for taxi drivers. When the restaurant opened in October 2003, though, hardly any of these target customers came.

"Those who came were mostly professionals, especially doctors from the nearby hospital," Revilla says. And to the partners' consternation, the prospective diners didn't want to order from the available fare but wanted to see a menu instead. Thus, after three months of dealing with situations like this, the partners decided to reformat the restaurant from fastfood to casual dining, with food cooked only upon being ordered.

The partners also decided to be more creative by coming up with the idea of serving exotic food, such as baboy damo (wild boar meat), sawa (snake meat), and stingray. This began to attract a good number of adventurous and curious clientele to the restaurant--until the partners received a letter of warning six months later from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources asking them to desist from serving endangered or near-extinct animal species.

Once again, the partners had to quickly revise their menu. This time they decided to focus on Filipino comfort food, mostly Ilocano favorites like pinakbet, bagnet, imbaliktad, and papaitan. However, they have continued to offer some of the exotic food they used to serve because these had since been excluded from the list of endangered species: adobong pugita (octopus), pritong palaka (fried frogs), and adobong igat (eel). "But we had already captured our market, so our exotic-food customers keep coming back even if we no longer serve the more exotic fare," Revilla explains.

The 300 sq m Kubong Sawali restaurant at Military Cut-Off Road currently has a capacity of up to 180 persons, with function rooms for parties and get-togethers. Back in 2004, the partners had taken a calculated risk by opening a 70-seat Kubong Sawali restaurant outlet in the newly opened SM Baguio mall at Luneta Hill on Upper Session Road corner Governor Pack Road.

The partners had been initially hesitant when they were offered restaurant space in what was then the still-to-be-built mall. "At first, takot kami [we were apprehensive] to compete with the bigger, more established restaurants like Dencio's and Gerry's," Revilla recalls.

But the partners eventually took the gamble. As it turned out, their first branch would earn back their initial investment of P2 million in just a little over a year, and earnings from that combined with profit from their SM Baguio branch would be enough to finance a third branch in Bauang, La Union in 2006. This branch has a completely new menu. These developments proved that Kubong Sawali was ready to compete with the big guns.

One of Kubong Sawali's specialties is a pulutan dish called "Half-Half Pulutan dish: Chicharon Bulaklak at Kilawing Susay." It combines the favorite pulutan of the partners themselves: chicharon (pork fat cracklets) for Revilla and blue marlin kilawin (raw blue marlin meat) for Agcolicol.

Agcolicol and Revilla definitely have gone a long way since proving their naysayers wrong twice in a row about a good location for a restaurant. Indeed, at least in their case, the formula for success has not been all "Location, location, location." Rather, the partners say, it has been "a combination of good food, right price, and advertising."

Catering to your locale
Sonny Agcolicol and Henry Revilla of Kubong Sawali have learned these two big lessons about running a restaurant in their own turf:

• You need to know your community. "The residents in Baguio just want good food and value for money," the partners say. Once you get the pulse and the attitude of your market, give them what they want and they'll keep coming back.

• You need to innovate. "People in the highlands are more of meat eaters," the partners explain. "Since we introduced seafood in our restaurant, however, we have won them over and they now appreciate seafood." Now, they say, Baguio folk know where to go for affordable, fresh seafood meals.
  

Contact Details:

KUBONG SAWALI
165 Military Cut-Off, 2600 Baguio City
Mobile: 0928-6224168; 0928-4242284
Telephone: (074) 304-1578