Kubong Sawali restaurant

BUSINESS BITS
Mari-An Santos

BAGUIO CITY -- 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 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!]"