>>Our family is everything.

When you walk into the restaurant, you see pictures of our family.

And you see pictures of our ancestors.

I joke with guests tha they're here to keep us honest.

So that we remember what they have done so that we could be here now.

>>Your appetite again.

>>I don't think in their dreams, they thought that their kids would be opening a Filipino restaurant in Orlando, Florida.

But they're so proud.

>>Kaya's like open to everything because it means capable.

We always say we can do whatever we want whenever the hell we want.

We get to choose and we get to decide because Kaya because we can.

>>I think as Filipino Americans, sometimes it can be challenging to think about, like, how am I going to make sure that my next generation is still connected to our history, our ancestors, our families, and sitting around a table and having fun together and eating felt like a very natural way to do that.

>>The inception of Kaya began jus of my exploration of my culture as I became a chef and like working at all these restaurants, I realized, like, they have these traditions in their culture, they have these wants and needs that fulfill them, and I'm searching for it.

>>Lo always knew what he wanted to do.

>>I actually started cooking because I was at home a lot alone.

I really felt like that was a path for me.

But being a Filipino kid, you couldn't go to culinary school it wasn't an option for me.

I asked to go and go like, no, you should go to college.

And that's where we met.

This girl comes up to me and she says, are you Filipino?

>>That wasn't the first time I had done that to someone.

>>And I just look up at her with, like, my burger, my mouth, and I'm like, yes.

>>I think I'm always looking for ways to build community with other folks.

I grew up kind of moving around a lot when I was little, and part of tha was living in the Philippines.

I got to really be immersed in the culture and the food in a way that I think really forme my approach to being Filipina, and which is that it's just normal.

Fast forward.

We actually ran into each other again into a parking lot at church.

You know, I don't think at that time we had any idea that this is where we went.

>>Mayb she didn't have an idea.

>>We.

Soon after that, Lo kind of pulled me aside and was like, you know, I always wanted to open a Filipino restaurant.

That's my plan.

And so we just started to kind of see, like, what would it look like to work together to put our ideas together?

And the reason why we opened up Kaya in this particular way, to say Filipino food is valuable.

It's so small in people's minds, but it's so large in reality.

>>In the Philippines, or like any country, you can have the spectrum of food, you can have street food, you can have home cooking, you can have fine dining and everything in between.

And then you come to America, and ethnic food, brown and black folks' food is typically kind of relegated to being street food.

Cheap food.

>>Whe people think about fine dining, they think about white tablecloth.

They think about omakase restaurants.

Why isn't Filipino food fine dining?

In other culture we literally have the guideline.

And opening Filipino restaurant, it makes it even harde because we have no guidelines.

We are making the guideline.

>>Filipino food's good enough.

It doesn't have to be mixed with something in order to be worthy or to be valuable.

Just because you have thi first world Western civilization history of having dynamic food for the past thousand years, you know, does that really make your food more valuable?

Or is it a perception?

>>The Filipino community sometimes pushes back because it doesn't look exactly like the way that they had it growing up.

>>They have a lot of misconceptions that I feel like we're trying to break.

>>Because it can be an opportunity to, like, really engage in what makes Filipino food and cultur beautiful and worthy and diverse and something that we can share and celebrate more broadly.

>>When titas and titos come in, even though it looks so different, they say oh, this tastes like Kare Kare, this, this tastes like Afritada, this tastes like Pancit.

What Kaya means to the community is like they're willing to take the jump.

>>Bayanihan means a spirit of communal support, and is oftentimes depicted by a bunch of community members carrying a house together.

A lot of the ways that we've built Kaya is around the same value.

We bring our parents regions, our friends, our staff, 7,000 islands, hundred of ethno-linguistic communities into the conversation.

>>To see how they react to the adversity that we have at hand.

The team like that doesn't just happen.

That happen to like people meeting together and also jumping on that mission together.

>>Folks are pleasantly surprise by how much they feel at home.

That we remember their names, what their favorite part of the meal was last time or something they didn't love.

>>Th dining experience is so valuable to the community and culture building.

It connects people because now you have to dine with the person across from yo because sama sama is together.

>>We're just trying to build the restaurant we want to eat at, and then build the community that we want to be a part of.

>>Where people come in and there's action going on all the time.

>>We want to share that with our local community, because Orlando is beautiful, because it's such a supportive community, because it's a place wher we can celebrate the diversity and hopefully we become stronger because of it.

When you make Kaya mean the restaurant instead of meeting capable, Kaya, that actually mean that Kaya belongs to all of us.

>>A restaurant lives because the people that support it.

>>We feed them, they feed us.

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