Everyone is drawn to elevating food, art, and culture. Still, for the team behind Celera, including chefs Nicco Santos and Quenee Vilar and sommelier Pam Begre, elevation is nothing if you’re not grounded in your roots.

PHOTOGRAPHY Paul Sugano

For Nicco Santos and Quenee Vilar, looking outward has always been part of finding their way home. Both spent formative years abroad, absorbing different cultures, kitchens, and ideas about hospitality before eventually bringing those experiences back to Manila.
Singapore, where Santos spent a significant part of his career, was instrumental in shaping his palate. Malay, Chinese, Indian, and Peranakan cuisines existed alongside one another; an exquisitely refined meal one day could be followed by something equally memorable at a hawker center the next. More than introducing him to a wider vocabulary of flavors, the experience challenged conventional notions of what makes food sophisticated.
“Food didn’t need to be complicated to have depth,” he says. He developed an appreciation for acidity, spice, fermentation, texture, and bold flavors, but just as importantly, learned when to exercise restraint. While Celera is not a Singaporean restaurant, Santos acknowledges that the experience remains part of its makeup. “That part of my life is definitely in its DNA.”
The restaurant’s name itself carries a trace of this history. Celera comes from the Malay selera, a word closer to “appetite” or “taste.” For Santos, however, its significance goes back to 2001. His first mentor, based in Kuala Lumpur, told him that if he genuinely wanted to understand how to layer flavors, he first had to take care of his palate. Santos was a smoker at the time. She told him that he needed to quit.
He stopped immediately and never touched a cigarette again.

It is a small story, but one that reveals something about how Santos’s relationship with taste has evolved. When he was younger, cooking was more about proving what he could do: more techniques, stronger flavors, more happening on the plate. With age, that impulse has almost reversed.
“I’ve become more interested in why something needs to be there in the first place,” he says. “I’m constantly removing things now. Does it taste better? Does it make sense? Does it say something about us?”
Perhaps this is where his tendency to philosophize about food comes from. After years spent mastering how to make a dish, the more compelling question has become why make it at all.
That curiosity extends beyond what is served on the plate. Santos is equally interested in the rituals surrounding food and hospitality, particularly the small gestures through which different cultures communicate care. He cites Japan and Thailand and the physical act of bowing as something that has long fascinated him.
"For a brief moment, you lower yourself in acknowledgement of another person,” he says. “Bowing is such a simple gesture, but it communicates respect, gratitude, and warmth without needing to say anything.”
There is something distinctly grounded about the gesture: to honor another person requires, quite literally, lowering oneself. It also reflects Santos’s belief that respect is most meaningful when it doesn’t call attention to itself. It can be found in how someone is welcomed, how a chef speaks to the team, how help is acknowledged, or simply how a guest is sent off at the end of an evening.

"For a brief moment, you lower yourself in acknowledgement of another person. Bowing is such a simple gesture, but it communicates respect, gratitude, and warmth without needing to say anything.”

“At its best, hospitality asks you to put someone else before yourself for a moment,” he says. “You’re paying attention to them, trying to make them feel comfortable and cared for without expecting recognition for doing it.”
That philosophy extends behind the kitchen doors. For Santos, hospitality cannot be genuine if the people expected to provide it are denied the same consideration. “If the people cooking and serving the food don’t feel respected themselves, it’s difficult to create genuine hospitality for someone else.”
At Celera, this means maintaining discipline and high standards without perpetuating the severity traditionally associated with professional kitchens. The team can take its work seriously, Santos believes, without taking itself too seriously. Guests, likewise, can be cared for attentively without making the experience feel stiff or overly ceremonial. “Respect should be felt rather than constantly explained.”
Vilar’s path abroad was different, but similarly formative. Before leaving the Philippines, she studied at De La Salle College of Saint Benilde, with her education and subsequent internship in Florida providing her first sustained encounter with the realities of a professional kitchen. The experience taught her independence and discipline, but also helped sharpen her ambitions: what kind of establishment she wanted to work in, what cuisine she wanted to pursue, and ultimately, what kind of chef she wanted to become.
Living in the United States accelerated that education. Away from home and without family to fall back on, Vilar found herself learning adulthood alongside the demands of the kitchen. During her internship, she suffered a serious accident that left her with second-degree burns. She continued working through the pain and eventually underwent surgery without her family beside her.
The experience tested her resolve, but so did the culture of the kitchen itself. At the time, Vilar recalls an industry still governed by decidedly old-school attitudes toward gender. She was nevertheless trusted with some of its harder, hotter stations—an opportunity to prove that capability had little to do with whether the person behind the stove was a man or a woman.

“Gender shouldn’t define what you can do,” she says. “What matters is how good you are at what you do, how hard you work, and what you’re willing to put into it.”
Eventually, however, independence gave way to another question: what was all of it for? Vilar had worked hard, enjoyed her youth, and built a life abroad, but began wondering whether there was something more she wanted to accomplish.
“I started asking myself if that was all there was to it,” she recalls, “or if I could achieve more.”
The question would eventually lead her back to the Philippines. What Santos and Vilar brought home, however, was not simply an accumulation of foreign techniques or references. Their years away had given them perspective: an understanding that being open to the world need not mean losing sight of where one stands. At Celera, influences are absorbed rather than displayed for their own sake, becoming part of a restaurant that remains curious about what is already here.
Along the way, they found kindred spirits who shared this way of looking at food and hospitality. Among them is Celera sommelier Pam Begre, whose own education in wine began not from the pursuit of expertise or prestige, but from a practical need to better serve people.

In 2018, Begre was Managing Partner of Frangipani El Nido, the hotel she ran with her husband. The restaurant had no sommelier, and Begre found herself increasingly drawn to being on the floor during service—getting to know guests, training the team, and discovering how wine could become another form of hospitality. She began hosting monthly wine dinners and learning from sommeliers who passed through Manila. Curiosity soon became a vocation.
Her relationship with wine remains similarly rooted in curiosity rather than prestige. Begre is fascinated by its history, complexity, and geography, but equally wary of the barriers that have traditionally surrounded it.
“There’s often a misunderstanding between those who know and those who don’t know about wine,” she says. “There shouldn’t be a barrier. Something so good should be democratic.”
For Begre, learning about wine became a way of navigating what she calls a “labyrinth”—finding the bottles and stories that deserve to be known and using them to unlock another dimension of a meal. She is interested less in wine for its consumption or effects than in “the myriad of stories behind it, the magic that it further affords a bite and a feast.”

Perhaps cooking—and hospitality itself—is not so different from taking a bow.
There is a similar thought contained in the Japanese expression itadakimasu, traditionally said before eating. Often understood as “I humbly receive,” the phrase acknowledges that a meal does not simply appear before us. It carries within it ingredients and lives, human labor and natural forces, the hands that cultivated and prepared it, and everything that allowed it to arrive at the table. To eat can therefore be an act of receiving as much as consuming.
For all the impulse to elevate food, perhaps the more meaningful gesture is first to lower oneself before it: to pay attention, acknowledge where it came from, and honor the people and places that made it possible.
A bow before a meal; a meal as a bow. At Celera, being grounded may be the highest form of elevation.

Grounded Taste: Celera

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