How Filipino Restaurant Entrepreneurs in London Rewrote the Rules of Global Dining

Words By Mye Mulingtapang | Photos courtesy of Kasa & Kin

Beneath Soho’s neon clatter, below the street-level rush of Wardour Street, Kasa and Kin hums — precise, deliberate, unmistakably alive. The air smells of sizzling pork fat and calamansi glaze. A plate of sisig snaps against the pan; conversations spill from English to Tagalog without apology.

Across the floor, Filipino restaurant entrepreneurs in London Rowena Romulo and Chris Joseph move in natural rhythm. She greets guests with a practiced grace; he adjusts timing at the kitchen pass, scanning the line with the controlled urgency of someone who’s opened markets for global giants. They exchange a brief nod — the silent synergy of two people rebuilding identity through work.

This is not retirement. It’s a redefinition.

From Boardrooms to Kitchens: The Romulo–Joseph Reinvention

Rowena came from legacy. Her grandfather, Carlos P. Romulo, was a national icon — diplomat, writer, president of the UN General Assembly. The Romulo family compound in Manila was a walled history of power and expectation. Four houses. One shared kitchen. You didn’t miss mealtime; it was a rule of faith.

Discipline followed her to London. In three decades of banking, she rose to managing director — one of the highest-ranking Filipinas in European finance. The office overlooked the 

Thames; the view was enviable, the isolation exhausting. Excellence was her armour.

Chris came from another architecture of ambition — corporate rather than cultural. Over thirty years, he engineered global growth for Domino’s Pizza and Krispy Kreme, opening twenty-two markets and eighty stores across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. He specialised in the logistics of taste: supply chains, franchise systems, operational precision.

Both successful. Both unsatisfied.

In 2014, at a charity event, someone challenged Rowena: “Why isn’t there a place like Romulo Café in London?”

The question stuck. Filipino cuisine had no stage — too often reduced to family nostalgia or diaspora comfort. She wanted visibility, not sentimentality.

Chris saw the risk in percentages. Rowena saw the meaning. Between them, vision outlasted logic.

Turning Legacy Into Legacy Cuisine

Romulo Café opened in Kensington in 2016 — forty covers, ochre walls, quiet assurance. The menu was more manifesto than novelty: kare-kare from her Tito Greg, adobo from her mother, ube cheesecake unbothered by trends. Filipino food, executed with the precision of global dining but none of its pretension

.

It worked. Critics crossed borough lines to taste what Filipinos already knew. "The Guardian called it “a revelation. Time Out named it Most Loved Restaurant."

But for Rowena and Chris, validation wasn’t the point. “We opened a door,” she says. “Everyone who came after ran with it. That’s the real legacy.”

They didn’t build for fusion. They built for permanence.

“We’re not just serving food—we’re the closest thing to a real Filipino experience.” -Chris Joseph

Filipino cuisine wasn’t misunderstood. It was under-positioned—reduced to either homesickness or novelty, rarely treated as serious.

So they did what most professionals avoid: they walked away from competence.

Building Kasa and Kin: Filipino Cuisine at the Center of London’s Food Scene

By 2021, they were ready to expand. Kasa and Kin opened in Soho — larger, sharper, built around the native rhythm of sizzle and grill. “Kasa” for home; “Kin” for connection.

Chris engineered the architecture — sourcing, staffing, and systems honed from a lifetime of multinational operations.

Rowena curated the soul: the recipes, the narrative, the sense of pride that Filipino food deserved to be here not as a trend but as an equal.

They fused precision with devotion. Pork from Dingley Dell Farms. English Wagyu for lumpia. Norfolk chicken for inasal. Every detail insisted that authentic didn’t mean imperfect.

The industry noticed. The Caterer put them on its cover. The Curry Awards named Kasa and Kin Best Filipino Restaurant of the Year.

In a city that cycles through culinary obsessions, Kasa and Kin endures — not as a novelty, but as a reference point.

What Reinvention Looks Like After 30 Years in Corporate Life

Leaving corporate meant relearning instinct. In finance, Rowena had data. In QSR, Chris had standardisation. Restaurants, however, run on variables — heat, mood, memory.

“In the boardroom, data is control,” Rowena says. “In the kitchen, control kills what matters.”

Chris went from scaling systems to slowing them down. “In franchises, you replicate. In heritage cooking, you localize. You allow craft to breathe.”

The Rise of Filipino Restaurants Across the UK

When Romulo Café opened in 2016, there were four Filipino restaurants in the United Kingdom. Today, there are nearly one hundred — from Bristol to Edinburgh, from pop-ups to fine dining.

London no longer treats Filipino food as an undercurrent. It’s a movement — purple, proud, expanding. Ube lattes have entered chain cafés; adobo appears on tasting menus.

“Filipinos are turning the world purple,” Chris jokes. He’s not exaggerating. 

With their partnership with Jollibee UK rolls Kasa’s ube ice cream into twelve UK stores, that color becomes shorthand for belonging.

The couple call their next phase Kasitas: smaller formats, same DNA. Scalable, but still human. “Filipino dining deserves to evolve,” Rowena says. “Not upward. Outward.”

The transition from global boardrooms to the heart of Soho was never about managing the minutiae of a single service; it was about masterminding the high-stakes details that define cultural authority. 

By obsessing over the strategic touch points of the experience, Rowena and Chris ensure Kasa and Kin serves as a homecoming for the Filipino community and a sophisticated revelation for the uninitiated. For them, true leadership lies in perfecting the 'big things'—the uncompromising authenticity of a flavour profile and the precision of the narrative—that transform a meal into a permanent landmark of London’s culinary landscape."

Why Filipino Food No Longer Needs an Introduction

They left power-driven careers behind. Yet what they’ve built commands another kind of authority — measured not in balance sheets but in rooms full of people proud to taste where they’re from. “Kitchens,” Chris says, “are just boardrooms with heat.” So the heat stays on. The lights too.

And through them, Filipino restaurant entrepreneurs in London keep rewriting what ambition — and home — can taste like.