Buboy brings its take on a Filipino-style casse-croûte to NDG

It’s Saturday afternoon, and R&B is playing from the speakers inside Buboy. In the corner, a Filipino game show plays on a TV, and the shelves are lined with ingredients and snacks you might find at a sari-sari variety store in the Philippines.

The restaurant lends a sense of comfort with just 15 seats, like eating in a friend’s kitchen. Walking up to the cash, the staff are sharing a joke and there’s a relaxed, familial feeling in the air. 

In a time when restaurants are often opened by a restaurant group or a buzzy chef collab, Buboy stands out as a mom-and-pop—or more like mom-and-pop-and-family—restaurant:

It was opened by chef and owner Eric Lazaro Magno, which he runs alongside his sister Yvonne and his cousin Glen in the kitchen, and with the help of family friend Gayle. His parents have been deeply involved in recipe development, and while he prefers to cook for them instead of having them in the kitchen, they are still devoted to Buboy, washing the laundry and rags every week. 

Eric opened Buboy two years ago in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce's Monkland Village, surrounded by homes and leafy parks. The concept is based on the carinderia, what Eric describes as the Filipino equivalent of a casse-croûte, serving casual home-style cooking.

Instead of setting out to recreate authentic dishes or even modern interpretations, he explains that he wants people to think about Buboy as a spot where their shoulders can relax and know that the food will be delicious and comforting.

Nostalgic flavours

“When I was building the menu for the restaurant, my parents would tell me, ‘Oh you gotta do it this way to introduce it to the Western crowd. But I was like no, I want to introduce it as is. A lot of the items that we do are the off-cuts or weird stews, the kind of food we would have after school or after work.”

“Many of the main items on the menu are food that I pulled out of memories, from the feeling of when my grandmother used to cook, when my mom used to cook.” 

For example, in developing Buboy’s recipe for laing, a taro leaf and coconut stew that is simmered for hours, Eric explains that he built upon his mom’s recipe.

The food at Buboy is evocative not only for the Magno family, but many other Filipino clients as well. “When other Filipinos come, they say damn, this is just like back home,” Eric says. 

That popularity has led to events and pop-ups. It also led to them expanding their all-you-can-eat brunch service every weekend. With two seatings at 11 am or 1 pm, it’s a chance to get an ample taste of classic Filipino breakfast items: scrambled egg with tomato, longganisa sausage, seared chicken thigh tocino, and the eggplant omelette tortang along.

From mechanic to a chef

Montreal runs in Eric’s veins, being born in Côte-des-Neiges and growing up in Lachine. Before opening Buboy, Eric was a mechanic who loved cooking, and he would spend his evenings working at restaurants around the city. Eventually in 2018, he quit his job as a mechanic and decided to go to the Philippines to learn more about the cuisine of his heritage.

“My family are farmers. My grandfather worked in the rice fields, and he died in the rice fields.”

Going back to the Pangasinan province in the north of the Philippines was a way for Eric to understand not only how his parents cooked, but also how his wider family cooked. That was deeply rooted in the land where generations of his family have lived, farming vegetables and rice.

He spent a month living with extended family on the farm, watching the vegetables they harvested, or the chicken they would kill fresh at home. Every dish was anchored in a sense of place and tradition.

“Wherever they are harvesting those vegetables, that’s where they’ve been harvesting for years. It’s not like us when we go to the grocery store. Theirs is the same cabbage that my great-grandmother would’ve harvested.”

Buboy today

When Eric got back to Montreal, he took the attention to detail that he’d honed while working in other restaurants and combined it with the flavours of Ilocano cuisine, referring to the community and language spoken in the Northern Philippines. 

“Everything we do is low and slow, we don’t skip steps, we take our time with everything.”

The lechon roasted pork takes days to make, during which the Buboy team dries the skin so that it gets extra crispy, roasts it in the oven, and grills it before serving. Eric prioritizes making things from scratch, so they make their own Mang Tomas liver sauce to serve with the lechon, down to the banana vinegar that adds a tangy edge to the earthy sweetness of the chicken liver. 

Asked about how it feels like to go from his research trip in Pangasinan to having Buboy today, Eric says, “it’s a dream. I mean, it’s hard work, I wish I was with my dog more, but I love it, this is what I signed up for.”

Buboy is located at 5976 Monkland Avenue.