Gallery by Chele: How the Michelin-starred restaurant stumbled into sustainability

Gallery by Chele didn’t set out to win the inaugural Michelin Green Star in the Philippines, an award given by the prestigious global restaurant rating system to establishments "at the forefront of the industry when it comes to sustainable practices."  

In fact, Chef Chele Gonazalez says they don't even market themselves as a sustainable restaurant.

"This didn't happen because I wanted to be a sustainable restaurant," Chele tells GMA News Online on Zoom one afternoon. "It happened because of the way I learned how to cook. You get seasonal ingredients, we work directly with farmers — and sometimes sustainable ingredients mean quality ingredients," he says.

According to the Michelin Guide, inspectors consider a number of things when giving out the Green Star, including "the provenance of the ingredients, the use of seasonal produce, the restaurant's environmental footprint, food waste systems, general waste disposal, and recycling."

When the Michelin Guide first introduced the Green Star in 2021, Gallery by Chele was nearly 10 years into practicing what the Micheline Guide calls sustainability.

Their evolving menus had already been highlighting local ingredients, like heirloom rice and local salts. And their team of chefs had already been experimenting with what otherwise would've been considered agricultural waste, like cacao pulp.

In its fifth floor space in BGC, Gallery by Chele was already keeping a small garden, where they grow local and endemic herbs, like pancit-pancitan, talinum, gotu kola, and the insulin plant. The garden also allows them to minimize food waste through composting.

These are all important actions to take to curb climate change: minimizing food and agricultural waste reduces methane emissions, said to be a more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon in the long run. Using local ingredients and growing your own food meanwhile reduce carbon emissions. Working directly with communities and ensuring local ingredients and practices continue to thrive are the very sense of climate work.

But "reducing a few kilos of waste isn't really gonna change anything in the in the environment." Chele says conscious not to greenwash.

He says they do it "because the practice means something to us."

"It's our values, and in everything that we do, we try to give value — to the local ingredients, to the farmers, to the communities, to the heirloom rice varieties, to the work."

When Chele and co-owner Chef Carlos Villaflor went up the stage to receive the Green Star Award in October 2025, they were already neck-deck in the pursuit of adding more value to things. They were in the planning stages of yet another garden revamp. They were also set to reintroduce the Heirloom Rice tasting menu.

Gallery by Chele is famous for its an ever-evolving tasting menus that come in a 6 or 10 course extravaganza, with a vegetarian option to the fish/meat meal to boot, too. Centering on one particular ingredient, the menu often takes diners on a culinary journey with inventive approaches, wild reimaginings, skilled execution, and inspired application.

This year, it's the Heirloom Rice Tasting Menu, which features a host of varieties including the endangered Unoy from the Pasil community in Kalinga that Chele is trying to support and promote, and in doing so, preserve.

"It would have disappeared," he said. But that's getting ahead of the story.

The Heirloom Rice experience begins with a welcome drink made from local ingredients and homegrown ferments. Diners are then taken on a short tour around the restaurant, first stopping by the garden, where their garden Chef, Enzo Olalia, explains the restaurant's sustainability practices and efforts at growing their own ingredients while presenting a small nibble made of and inspired by the plants grown there.

According to Villaflor, the garden is something of an ode to foraging, which "Chef Chele and I do a lot of."

"At the same time, we go to different farms, different communities — so these are things that we kind of want to bring home and try to plant and see how we can propagate and use in the restaurant," he said.

From the garden, diners are taken to the Stvdio Lab, where their research and development, often taking them to far corners of the country are explained. Team members present the near-scientific but delicious experiments that they engage in, like the curious little bite consisting of a fermented mango covered in fuzz that is bubod, a traditional starter culture that contains yeast, molds, and bacteria.

Magic starts when diners are seated back at their table. Through each course, rice is presented in all its glorious possibilities: as wine soaking a beautifully cooked grouper, as a cracker paired with the delicious wagyu A5, as vinegar to the stellar pulpo dish, as the unusual fermented ice cream served with succulent crab meat, as the rich arroz caldo base to the the abalone, as mirin to a joyful kinilaw— everything it seems except in the form of rice as we know it.

Heirloom rice is one of the things that the Spanish chef discovered while getting to know the country he would eventually call home. "We're talking about 2014," Chele said of the year he dove head first into research and exploration.

He recalled his old paella restaurant where he "was focused to really use local ingredients as much as we could." Chele went to IRRI, gave the bomba rice (often used in paella) so they could do a scientific study to find the closest variety to it, and also embarked on a 40-day travel around the country, meeting with so many communities around the country, and landed on various heirloom rice varieties.

Some of those are varieties are now featured in Gallery's current menu: Tinawon, Deremen, Ginnonaw, Black Lennangang, and Unoy from the Pasil community in Kalinga, which incidentally is the only indigenous community in the Philippines recognized by Slow Food, a global movement working "to ensure good, clean and fair food for all" and its Unoy rice, the first Slow Food Presidia in the country, described in the website as slow food communities "committed to preserving and passing on traditional production techniques and crafts."

Pasil was among the communities Chele visited in 2014. He would once again meet them at the Slow Food Terra Madre Asia Pacific 2025, "the largest sustainable food event in the region," Ramon Uy Jr, International Councilor for Southeast Asia of Slow Food, told GMA News Online on email.

"I introduced him [Chele] to the Slow Food Community of Pasil and following the event, he visited the community to learn and conduct research for his new menu. We are thrilled that more chefs are championing local Ark of Taste and presidia ingredients through the support of Slow Food communities," adds Uy.

In reconnecting with the Pasil community, Chele also enlisted the help of Department of Tourism "because you cannot go there yourself."

For Chele, featuring Unoy in the menu is one way to help the community. "When I went there, people didn't want to do it anymore because it's just so much work. The prices were still the same, and they did not have any support."

But he takes it a step further: At Gallery by Chele, diners not only learn more about it as they eat their way through dinner, they are also given the chance to directly support the farmers; the restaurant is selling the rice at a fair price so they "can continue to grow it and earn enough."

Located in the Kalinga Province right next to the more popular municipality of Buscalan, Pasil sits in highly fertile soil some 700m above sea level.

Unsurprisingly, a body of water, the Pasil River, has made the land "particularly suited to agriculture," Slow Food says. Its rice terraces are not just a marvel to look at, they also boast high biodiversity. According to Slow Food, "it is possible to find 18 different native Unoy rice varieties still being grown in the area."

But in the post-war population boom, which required the scaling up and the speeding up of food production, traditional rice varieties like Unoy — which required a lot more work and a lot more time — had to take a back seat to commercial and high yielding rice varieties.

 

 

 

 

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Despite industrialization, despite climate change, despite the younger generations leaving the mountains for the grayer pastures of the city, the Pasil community persisted. Rice, after all, is life.

According to Slow Food, the Unoy rice varieties in Pasil "are traditionally served during weddings and family reunions, especially during 'pusipus' celebration, the gathering of relatives before a sick or elderly family member dies. The glutinous or sticky rice varieties are instead used in a wide variety of recipes, mixed with coconut or coconut milk and to make rice wine."

It was in the mid-2000s, when Pasil started exporting their heirloom rice that it made its way to a Slow Food member. In 2009, three of its heirloom rice varieties received nominations to be included in the Ark of Taste, Slow Food's catalogue of endangered food products, which currently lists 119 items from the Philippines, including Asin Tibuok from Visayas, Barako Coffee, and Batwan).

According to Uy, there will have been a few more engagements between the two parties before Pasil's official recognition as the first Indigenous community in the Philippines in 2017.

The recognition paved the way for Pasil to receive the "'Food and Tourism for Rural Development in the Cordillera' a collaborative project with the Department of Tourism, Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR), FAO Mountain Partnership and Slow Food, which helped identify the Ulikan Red Rice of Pasil," Uy said.

That served as the starting point for the community to identify and reintroduce a whopping 33 more heirloom rice varieties. When the opportunity came for Slow Food to develop a Presidia in the Philippines, "the Pasil community was the natural choice," Uy said.

The Unoy Presidium was established in 2024.

"There are no historical testimony of the connection between the rice and the Pasil Valley other than the indigenous people oral knowledge, which has been threatened by the introduction of high yielding products during the Green Revolution," Slow Food said.

From being overlooked for reasons of food security, Unoy is now interestingly being recognized for, well, food security. Unoy is highly resilient to drought, which is a main concern given climate change. Where before it took a back seat for the newer, higher-yielding varieties of the Green Revolution, Unoy is now seen as "crucial for ensuring food security and preserving Pasil's rich agricultural heritage."

Heirloom rice. Courtesy: Gallery by Chele

The Unoy Rice Presidium has only been up and running for two years and already, production of Unoy Rice has doubled from 30 hectares in seven barangays in 2024 to 60 hectares in 13 barangays last year. "Direct sales in local markets increased by 20% while there was also a 15% increase in direct national sales. A clear signal that the Unoy Presidia is helping in the preservation and conservation for the IP communities of Pasil," Uy said.

In many ways, Gallery by Chele is highlighting everything we stand to lose in the face of climate change: food security and the delight of a delicious and nutritious meal; indigenous wisdom and practices, our culture and tradition.  

Villaflor brings up acute observations: The fluctuation of prices, which is a clear indication of dwindling supplies, and the growing challenges of maintaining a garden in the building, thanks to urban development.

"The weather is very inconsistent," he says, "and now with all the buildings, the sunlight isn't as good as before. We'd be lucky to get four hours of sunlight." Previously, they had no trouble getting a solid eight hours of sunlight, Villaflor said.

But in many ways, Gallery by Chele is also showing what can be done. Minimizing food waste, leaning on local ingredients, supporting local communities — these are insights gained from being a foreigner, he said. 

Because in moving to the Philippines, Chele landed in country with a restaurant scene that didn't quite make sense — "You are in the second biggest biodiversity hotspot for fish and seafood in the world and you import fish?" He asked flabbergasted — and seasons that were "very unclear."

"That's why we use mostly local ingredients. That's the basis of our cuisine," Chele said.

It's not always been easy — the restaurant has survived financial struggles in the past — the inaugural Michelin Green awardee is seeing the results of their hard work and their decision to stand by their values pay off.

Still, Chele maintains "we are not here to fix the world. We are not here to fix the industry."

The Green Star "didn't happen because we wanted to be a sustainable restaurant," he continued, emphasizing their initiatives are only "small actions that have a good impact."

The restaurant's sustainability efforts, he says, is the result of the team doing "what matters to us."

And what matters is integrity; doing "things very well" and doing things that felt right.  

"State truthfully what you believe and state truthfully what you want to do," Chele said. "I think at the end of the day, integrity is the most important part. We didn't necessarily start as trying to be sustainable. It just happened because we stayed true to our values."

He acknowledges that perhaps "we're good for the environment, but that is not our main focus. It only happened because we have principles and what ever action we can do that goes in that direction, we are happy to do."

In the meantime, the green Michelin award is pushing them to improve. It's got them looking back to nature, and leaning even more on their values — the seasonality of produce, the quality it provides.  

"We're very seasonal," Villaflor proudly says. "If [an ingredient] is not in season, then we'll look for another ingredient that nature can provide us at this very moment."

"We really have to be flexible. We have remind ourselves that this is nature. It is nothing we can control, but we can understand it, how it can provide us the best of what we need for the restaurant." — GMA News