Merchants give fellow Filipinos a taste of home

From his apartment on the Radnor estate where he works as a butler, Hyen David is building a business based on a feeling he knows well - missing home.

The Philly-Pinoy grocery store he and his wife, Rowena, operate in Bridgeport stocks snacks, foods, and beauty products from the Philippines that local Filipinos have driven from as far as central New Jersey to buy.

Their Philly-Pinoy outdoor restaurant near the waterfront in Brooklyn, N.Y., serves Filipino cuisine to the cruise ship workers longing for a taste of home.

That hunger for the familiar is helping to fuel the Philly-Pinoy business, which David started with his wife and his brother, Viju. All formerly worked on cruise ships.

"After three months, you get homesick," said David, 33, "Then you miss the food, the family. You miss everything."

David runs his burgeoning business in between full-time work as a live-in butler to philanthropists Norman and Suzanne Cohn. That job takes him from Radnor to Center City to the Jersey Shore and to wherever else the Cohns spend vacation time.

The grocery business is David's way of becoming his own boss so that he can spend more time with his wife and two children, ages 3 and 17 months. He has told the Cohns he plans to leave their employ soon.

"Sometimes I stay away for weeks," David said. "It's hard for my wife."

Rowena David, 32, is the business partner with the product know-how at Philly-Pinoy. (Pinoy is an informal term Filipinos use to refer to one another.) She was born in Bauguio City, Philippines, and her family operates a grocery store back home.

Rowena and Hyen David met in 2000 when they worked on the cruise ship Aurora, part of the P&O Cruises line. Hyen David, who was born in Mumbai, India, and has a degree in hotel management, was a butler on the vessel. She was a safety coordinator. Viju David, 43, was a waiter on the Carnival cruise line.

In 1992, Viju David gave it up to settle in Northeast Philadelphia. Hyen and Rowena David followed after they married in 2004.

The family used part of its savings to open a children's clothing store in the Northeast, but the venture quickly failed. Then Hyen David found the job as a butler in 2005.

He lives with his family in a carriage house on the Cohn estate.

David "reads a lot of books about business, and he's even recommended a couple to me," said Norman Cohn, board chairman of the Advertising Specialty Institute, which provides marketing services to suppliers and distributors of promotional products. "He's honest and hardworking. I won't be surprised if in five or 10 years he's a major merchant."

David opened the grocery, which is on DeKalb Pike, in April 2010. He spends his off days at the Bridgeport store, and his wife and one employee run it the rest of the week. Rowena David, who has a degree in finance, also cooks the Filipino specialties such as menudo (a pork stew) and ginisang upo, a white squash dish, that stock the store's lunchtime steam table.

David has an expanding potential clientele. The Filipino population in the five-county Philadelphia area increased 36 percent from 8,573 in 2000 to 11,658 in 2010.

Noel Bernabe, 45, of Collegeville, stopped by last week for a lunch of pork barbecue and menudo.

"Once a week I crave Filipino food," said Bernabe, who was born in the Philippines and moved to King of Prussia in 1994. "This is a quick way to satisfy it."

When the Davids began looking for ways to expand their business, they thought of the very people they used to work with. They began taking carloads full of nuts, chips, and other products made in the Philippines to sell them at the docks in Baltimore and Manhattan.

When the Baltimore and Manhattan stops did not work out for the Davids because of parking regulations, they moved on to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn.

They found a storefront and apartment for rent only a block from the docks there. Eventually they set up shop in a space with outdoor bamboo decor that they say seemed meant for them.

Most of the workers on the cruise ships that dock at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal are Filipinos and Indians who hold jobs such as waiters, housekeepers, and laundry aides.

The store sells products such as banana chips, jarred papaya pickles, and cans of spicy squid cubes. Rowena David travels to Brooklyn to cook up the Filipino dishes that are sold when the ships dock, which is usually weekly during the summer.

Last weekend, Viju David tended chicken on a charcoal grill and served freshly fried whole tilapia, along with food made by Rowena David that was stored in individual plastic serving dishes for nuking in the store microwave.

"It's nice because we can eat our own dishes even though we are not in our own country," said Don Garchitorena, a bartender on the Caribbean Prince who was sitting at a picnic table and eating pork stew with rice alongside his wife, Rose, also a bartender on the ship. They live in Manila.

Aggie Ferrao, a ship bar supervisor, has not been home to India since March. Earlier this month, he asked Viju David to make some chicken biryani - a staple of Indian cooking. The dish was waiting for Ferrao in a pot on the gas grill last weekend.

"Any smell of Indian food reminds me of home," Ferrao said. "You can't compare it to what you get at home, but anything close to it just makes you feel better."