The Heirloom Rice Project: How Gallery by Chele is using fine dining to save a disappearing Filipino tradition

The team it houses is deliberately cross-disciplinary. Chef Kevin Menendez leads R&D, with a scientific and technical background that bridges gastronomy and food science. Executive sous chef Carlos Villaflor co-directs creative output alongside González. Rounding out the team are Francene Ordenes, who focuses on agroecology and the sourcing of native and endemic ingredients; Klaus Alas, the market chef who handles sustainable procurement; and Enzo Olalia, the garden chef. “Each of us takes on a different role,” says González. “It all connects in the end.”

What Stvdio Lab enables, fundamentally, is the freedom of creativity, even if it means making mistakes—to experiment without the pressure of service, to test an idea across weeks or months before it ever reaches a diner. “For me, creativity and curiosity are essential,” says González. “I cannot live without the R&D department.” 

Innovation at Gallery by Chele, González is clear to point out, is not for its own sake. “We survive because we innovate, we find ways to keep going and growing,” he says. “But to innovate is to open doors that have not been opened before, and to try to see things from a different perspective. That is what we have been doing at Gallery since day one. To look at local ingredients in a different way, to look at local flavours in a different way.” With The Heirloom Rice Project, that perspective turns toward one of the country’s most overlooked ingredients and the communities disappearing alongside it.

Read more: Flavours of My Youth: chef Chele González on the dish that ignited his love for food

The shift to single-ingredient menus—cacao in 2024, coconut in 2025, heirloom rice in 2026—was not, González says, a strategic decision. It was instinct, born from years of travel across the archipelago. “Choosing a single ingredient as the menu's focus was not really planned ahead. It happened naturally.”

His relationship with heirloom rice stretches back nearly 12 years, to the early days of ArroZeria (his now-defunct casual Spanish restaurant), when a desire to create a paella using local rice led him to collaborate with the International Rice Research Institute. That first thread pulled him toward the Cordilleras—particularly Kalinga, Banaue, Ifugao, and Benguet—and he has been returning ever since. “The place is magical, the people are amazing, and it's truly a treasure,” he says.

What he found there complicated his understanding of what rice could mean. “The thing about heirloom rice is that it is much more than a grain, much more than rice... There is almost a religion around it, in terms of what it means, and the environment and communities around it.” Biologically, heirloom varieties carry a resilience that commercial strains cannot match, showing greater tolerance to pests and shifting climate conditions. Many are rich in antioxidants and minerals. And yet their production is vanishing: as farming communities age and younger generations leave for more stable livelihoods, the knowledge to grow these grains leaves with them.

“We have not moved from our main philosophy—redefining luxury with local ingredients,” says González. “Even in a country with one of the largest fish and seafood biodiversity, people still prefer imported products. I didn’t believe in that.” The Heirloom Rice Project is, in many ways, the fullest expression of that 13-year refusal.

See also: 10 years of chef Chele González in the Philippines

The ten-course menu opens with a floral, zero-ABV sampaguita pét nat and a mochi made from tinawon violet heirloom red rice, its centre a refreshing dalandan jelly—a deliberate introduction to the menu’s intent: to celebrate what is local.

Early into the degustation, Stvdio Lab makes its impact known. Slices of Philippine mango arrive inoculated with bubod, the traditional rice-based fermentation starter used to produce tapuey, emerging after three days with a softened, concentrated sweetness and a white, velvety rind not unlike Camembert. It is disarming in a way impossible to ignore: a familiar fruit made strange, and yet more intensely itself in flavour—its natural sugars deepened, its flesh transformed by a process that is entirely Filipino.

What follows is a menu that moves fluidly between cultural reverence and technical invention. A trio of kakanin—puto of dikit violet rice with goat cheese mousse and tinapa powder; tupig of glutinous red rice with toasted rice crumble and peanut sauce, eaten off a banana leaf used as a spoon; sapin-sapin of ube, langka, and coconut with a sharp queso de bola tuile and latik— honours the form of traditional rice cakes while pushing each one somewhere new.

Related: Grain of nostalgia: Honouring kakanin across the Philippines

Fermentation remains one of the kitchen’s running obsessions. Buro—one of the more storied Filipino rice innovations, tangy, funky, and decidedly polarising—is reimagined as ice cream, its pronounced lactic funk and salinity lifted by pearls of ikura. It is the kind of audacity that works precisely because the vehicle is so universally beloved; few things charm a diner faster than a scoop of something familiar. What follows on the plate is a medley of sweet blue crab with a bright lime gel, an indulgent emulsion of crab fat, and basil-infused crab stock, elements that work seamlessly together, and with plenty of intrigue when the curveball of buro ice cream is tossed into the mix.

Elsewhere, garlic shio—made from fermented rice, salt, water, and garlic—is brushed onto succulent slices of yakitori-grilled lobster served over ube purée and a luxurious sea urchin sauce, one of several rice-derived bioproducts from Stvdio Lab that surface across the meal in the form of vinegars, flours, pastes, wine, and mirin. These are not empty flourishes; they are arguments: the possibilities of heirloom rice are endless, and Gallery by Chele has only just shown us where to begin our exploration.

Read more: Where indigenous flavours meet fine dining: How Asia’s best restaurants celebrate culinary traditions

The meal builds toward rice texturas, a pre-dessert that functions as the menu’s most explicit declaration. Six varieties from across the archipelago—deremen from Pangasinan, tapol from the Visayas, pinipig from Nueva Ecija, a white rice from the Mayoyao ethnic group, mountain violet, and minaanggan—each transformed: arroz con leche brightened with citrus zest, suman ice cream, crackers, tuiles, and crisps, harmoniously plated with sweet lakatan bananas. It is a geography lesson disguised as dessert, and one of the most eye-opening courses of the evening—a reminder of just how much is at risk of being lost.

“When you receive such recognition, it comes with a price,” González says of the Best Innovation award. “The price is to remain loyal and honest to its true meaning.”

That loyalty has a very practical face. At the end of every meal, guests can purchase bags of Cordillera heirloom rice to take home. Small cards on the table ask them to read, reflect, and reconsider. “If more people understand the value of these grains, we can help create a stronger market for the farmers who continue to grow them,” adds Villaflor. ”Supporting heirloom rice means supporting the communities that protect this heritage.”

González is direct about the economics: buying heirloom rice at 250 to 300 pesos per kilo is not a premium—it is a fair price for a crop harvested once a year, by hand, on mountain terraces. “We pay much more for imported rice like arborio or bomba, but not for local varieties that are nutritious and delicious.”

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Ask him what success looks like in five years, and the answer is less a business goal than a noble act of hope. “I think the answer is that we see heirloom rice used daily by Filipinos and around the world, giving it the value, nutrition, and deliciousness it deserves—highlighted as an incredible product from the Philippines, recognised around the world, used in many restaurants and available in many stores. Success means heirloom rice provides a bright future for the Cordilleras, their culture, and their livelihood, allowing them to live better. That would be something very impactful, beautiful, and a legacy that is truly positive for everyone.”

At Gallery by Chele, innovation has always served a purpose beyond gustatory pleasures. With The Heirloom Rice Project, that purpose finds its sharpest expression yet: a centuries-old grain, a fading tradition, and a restaurant asking us to pay attention before it's too late.

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