The Spy in the Sandwich

Sunday, September 07, 2025

9:00 AM | The Art of Failing in Dumaguete

Just because you are a popular franchise does not immediately entail you will be successful in Dumaguete. This is a lesson many chains—restaurants and cafés included—trying to make headway into the curious Dumaguete market have failed to learn, sometimes spectacularly, like a plate of overcooked pasta sent back to the kitchen. Dumaguete is not a blank canvas awaiting corporate paint. It is, rather, a living ecosystem, a town with its own rhythms, rituals, and hunger. To ignore these is to serve up failure on a sizzling plate.

I have seen it again and again: shiny new franchises opening with fanfare—balloons, ribbon-cuttings, a social media blitz promising the capital’s taste now available “in the provinces.” They attract the first-week crowd [or the first three-month crowd], the curious, and the selfie-hungry. And then the lights dim, the tables thin out, and one day you pass by and notice the signage has been quietly taken down, as though the restaurant had ghosted the city. What happened? The answer is usually simple: they didn’t know Dumaguete.

Take, for instance, the ridiculous phenomenon of restaurants taking last orders at 8:45 PM. Eight forty-five! As though Dumaguete were a city of children tucked in by nine. “Sorry, we’re closed na, last orders at 8:45 PM,” the waitress at the newly-opened Bigby’s over at Filinvest Mall told us last Friday night, when we wandered in for a late dinner after watching a play. Fine, if that’s how you operate. Our recourse: Sans Rival in the same mall, which opens till late at night—and is, if you noticed, a Dumaguete brand.

This is Dumaguete—a town that dines out, or goes to cafés, at nine. Always at nine. I don’t know why that is the case, but at 9 PM, people always trickle in. I’ll be working at a café like Bo’s, and then at 9 PM sharp, I look up and I see people trickle in. [This was especially true in the pre-pandemic.] If Manila eats at six and Cebu at seven, Dumaguete is unapologetically nocturnal. This is why Why Not?, even if it has become frightfully expensive these days, will always be special in our Dumagueteño hearts—because it opens as late as 2 AM. This is why places like Café Estacion or Hemmingway are popular, because they close at midnight. The day here is long and slow, and no one is in a rush to eat dinner early. Students are still hanging out at cafés past eight, professors are only just stirring from naps, doctors and lawyers are closing up their clinics, and suddenly everyone decides they are hungry—at 9 PM. To close the kitchen before the town is even ready to eat is not just bad business, it is cultural malpractice.

Is this because most of these franchises have decision-makers who are not really Dumaguete-based? And thus unable to really fathom the way we have contoured our lives in this city?

You see this happen during Founders Day—which is really two weeks in late August when the city essentially explodes in a celebration that is all about Silliman University. The city does get very busy—but it is a busyness that should be read in a careful way, or else something you do will turn out to be a fiasco.

Let’s say you are a new restaurant trying to make a splash, so you schedule your big opening or your big promo or some ill-timed “wine night” right smack in the middle of Founders Day. Rookie mistake. Founders Day is Dumaguete’s Mardi Gras, its Coachella, its everything rolled into fifteen chaotic days of parades, alumni parties, high school reunions, art exhibits, food fairs, concerts, etc. Everyone is busy. Everyone already has an itinerary. Nobody has time for your corporate stunt, least of all at your restaurant. If you are not part of the Founders Day constellation—if you have not embedded yourself in the alumni circuit, the Hibalag booths, the local pub crawls—then you are invisible. You simply do not stage an event during Founders Day. You join Founders Day, or you wait until September.

This is why local knowledge is everything. This city has its seasons, its rhythms, its secret codes. You have to know when the cicadas scream at noon, when the pedicab drivers converge at the corner of Silliman Avenue or Miciano Drive, when the professors decamp to Café Mamia after department meetings, when the doctors sneak to Casablanca for after-hours gin. You cannot run Dumaguete from a Manila spreadsheet, or Manila blueprint, no matter how many “trend reports” you paid for. Management must be local. Hire people who live here, who breathe the air and know when it smells of rain, who understand that a brownout can shut down an entire day’s business [unless you have generators], that a funeral in one barangay can drain the traffic of customers for hours. Hire people who know who eats and spends where, and why.

Dumaguete is not just any city. It is a university town, a place of endless transience and permanence locked in dance. Students come and go, professors linger, retirees settle, tourists drift in and out. The lifeblood of the city is conversation, not consumption. People don’t just eat here to fill their bellies; they eat to talk, to linger, to stretch out an evening into midnight over plates of Manang Siony’s tocino or bowls of pochero.

And Dumaguete has a nose for authenticity: it can sniff out corporate calculation from a mile away. What endures here are the places that feel true. Jo’s Chicken Inato, born here, not imported. Sans Rival, a dynasty of silvanas, with a legacy as rich as its buttercream. Neva’s, growing from humble beginnings in Puerto Princesa into an institution of Dumaguete pizza and pasta nights. Lab-as, still the definition of Dumaguete seafood, and longtime definer of Dumaguete night outs—although its legendary Reggae Wednesday has definitely seen better days. Even the humble tempurahan carts at the Pantawan in the Rizal Boulevard command more loyalty than a thousand franchises combined, because they belong to the city, they smell of sea breeze and memory. [And locals know they’re not really “tempura,” either.” We just call it ”tempura,” just because. It’s a local thing.]

So when a franchise comes in with its rigid hours, its Manila-style promos, its tone-deaf events, Dumaguete shrugs. Or worse, Dumaguete resists. Because here, loyalty is earned by listening, not imposing. You cannot bully Dumaguete into your business model. You have to court it, woo it, seduce it with understanding.

Once upon a time, National Bookstore opened a branch at Portal West, and was an instant success. Then, a few short years later, it transferred to Robinsons in what many locals has since considered to be a lamebrained corporate move—thinking that mall traffic was better than organic traffic in the heart of Dumaguete. Now, that bookstore is gone.

Once upon a time, Chapters Café opened here and thought it get by with its Instagram aesthetics inspired by books—not knowing that Dumagueteños are notoriously picky with its food. The bland menu was a quick turn-off, and the city—home of Asia’s oldest creative writing workshop, and home of many legendary writers—fled from its inauthentic book theme. [Do you remember those books they made displays of in their walls? Terrible books. Books you could in bulk get from a warehouse sale.] Now, that cafe is gone and is unremembered.

We just went to a new restaurant fronted by Manila celebrities, by the way.

Yikes.

Plastic cups for drinks? Yikes.

Bad plating? Yikes.

Unmemorable food? Yikes. [This is the worst offense. In a city bursting at the seams with many restaurants, you cannot, simply cannot, be unmemorable with your food.]

But the lines are still long since it’s new.

I’ll give it a year.

The irony is that Dumaguete is generous. But only if you play by its rhythms. Given that, the city will reward you with loyalty that can span years. But first, you will have to surrender the arrogance of thinking your brand name is enough. It is not. Not here. Here, you must prove yourself at nine o’clock sharp, during Founders Day, with locals at the helm. Otherwise, you will be just another forgotten franchise sign gathering dust in the city’s short memory, replaced by the next curious experiment. And Dumaguete will go on, unbothered, still dining at nine, still laughing into the night over plates that taste of home.