Miko Calo Cooks Her Grandmother’s Table at Po & Pilar

A grandmother’s kitchen can exert a long influence. For Miko Calo, the chef whose career has taken her through celebrated restaurants in Paris, London, Singapore, and Manila, some of her earliest lessons in food began in the Butuan home of Consuelo V. Calo—her Wawa.

Those memories will shape Just The Way My Wawa Made It, a one-night dinner at Po & Pilar on September 1, 2026. It is the third installment of the restaurant’s takeover series, which invites chefs and beverage professionals to set aside their customary menus and cook from a more personal source.

Calo grew up amid the daily activity of her grandmother’s large household. She remembers her aunts roasting homegrown cacao for tsokolate, afternoons spent eating sea salt with her nanny, and the cooks preparing the family’s evening meal. Her grandmother, meanwhile, maintained exacting standards for seafood and rice.

One dish remains especially vivid: inagun-un, the Butuan counterpart of paksiw. “She would use mangko, or mackerel tuna, and only a specific kind of vinegar and sea salt. She would let it age for a day or two before eating or serving it,” Calo recalls. “She also taught me to eat inagun-un with rendered pork fat and the sauce mixed into the rice.”

The dinner will draw from both the everyday dishes and the food served on special occasions during Calo’s childhood. Specific courses have yet to be disclosed, although the chef’s background suggests that memory will pass through a particularly accomplished technical vocabulary. A graduate of Ferrandi Paris, Calo spent seven years within Joël Robuchon International and later led Metronome in Manila. She now serves as culinary creative director of the Michelin Bib Gourmand-awarded Taquería Franco.

Her cooking has long reflected her fluency in Filipino and French traditions. At Po & Pilar, however, technique will serve a story that began well before professional kitchens entered the picture.

“She has roots and stories from Butuan,” says Po & Pilar co-founder Jericson Co. “The fluency she has with both practices, Filipino and French, is on a different level, and I’m so curious what that creativity will present.”

The collaboration also returns the series to the premise on which Po & Pilar was founded. Named for Co’s grandmothers, the restaurant approaches inherited recipes as living material: familiar tastes can be examined, rebuilt, and carried forward while retaining their emotional origin.

Previous editions featured Bruce Ricketts cooking in tribute to his late father, followed by Jordy Navarra of Toyo Eatery and JP Cruz of Inatô honoring their mothers. Calo’s dinner completes a neat return to the grandmother’s table, where the restaurant’s own story began.

The evening is ultimately concerned with what survives after a recipe leaves its original kitchen: a particular vinegar, the proper texture of rice, the instruction to mix rendered pork fat into a sauce. These details can contain an entire person. For one night, Calo will bring them back to the table.

Just The Way My Wawa Made It with Miko Calo will be held on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, at Po & Pilar in Legazpi Village, Makati. Dinner seatings are at 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. For reservations, call or message +63 962 909 1749.