At Gallery by Chele, rice is no longer just the quiet companion to a meal. In its latest tasting menu, The Heirloom Rice Project, the Michelin-recognized restaurant places rice at the center of the dining experience, treating it not as a filler or side dish, but as an ingredient with history, technique, and identity. The menu builds on the restaurant’s long-running interest in local ingredients and culinary research, extending a project that Gallery by Chele says began in 2016 through travels across the Cordillera to learn directly from farming communities and study heirloom rice varieties more deeply.
What makes this menu compelling is that it asks diners to rethink something deeply familiar. Instead of serving rice in its most expected form, Gallery by Chele uses heirloom grains from the Cordillera in multiple expressions across a 10-course tasting menu. Recent coverage of the menu notes varieties such as tinawon red and white, deremen, Kalinga unoy, Pasil unoy ginnonaw, black lennagang, and ijampfulo, showing just how wide the spectrum of Philippine rice can be when chefs choose to foreground it.
The menu’s strength lies in how it expands the idea of what rice can do. In this tasting experience, rice appears not only as grain but as process and transformation: it becomes mirin, miso, tapuey, buro, and other fermented or reworked forms that shape flavor in less obvious ways. One example described in recent reporting is a Mirin Kinilaw, where homemade mirin made from glutinous rice helps create a sweeter, more layered acidity than the dish’s more conventional vinegar-driven profile. Another is Buro Crab, paired with a fermented rice ice cream that pushes rice into a surprising, almost playful register. Dishes like Blossom and Abalone Arroz Caldo similarly show that the menu is not merely themed around rice, but structured around its texture, fermentation potential, and cultural resonance.
What gives the Heirloom Rice Project more weight than a clever tasting-menu concept is the story behind the ingredient itself. Gallery by Chele frames the project as part culinary exploration and part preservation effort. The restaurant says it sourced the menu’s heirloom rice through direct engagement with communities in the Cordillera, while newer coverage emphasizes that these grains are increasingly difficult to find in mainstream urban markets despite generations of cultivation and cultural importance. By placing heirloom rice in a fine-dining setting, the restaurant is not only elevating the ingredient aesthetically, but also helping create demand for products that might otherwise remain undervalued.
That may be the menu’s most interesting idea: it uses fine dining not to distance food from everyday life, but to bring people closer to what they have overlooked. Rice is so embedded in Filipino daily eating that it can easily disappear into habit. Gallery by Chele’s menu interrupts that habit. It invites diners to ask where rice comes from, how many forms it can take, what kinds of labor sustain it, and why some local varieties become invisible while imported or standardized grains dominate the market.
In that sense, The Heirloom Rice Project is about more than innovation. It is about attention. It asks people to look again at one of the most ordinary things on the Filipino table and see biodiversity, craftsmanship, and regional knowledge in it. Gallery by Chele has long described itself as a restaurant driven by local ingredients and by the desire to translate culture, nature, and tradition into flavor. This menu feels like a particularly strong expression of that philosophy: ambitious in technique, but grounded in something recognizable and deeply Filipino.
