In addition to Peters’s dedicated retail space within the bakery, the dining area will integrate plants that Peters sources from Southeast Asia. The pair bonded as Abenoja introduced her to Filipino cuisine and shared more cultural background. Peters was adopted from the Philippines but didn’t grow up immersed in Filipino culture. In what Abenoja calls a “serendipitous meeting,” she connected with her business partner Daphne Peters of Daphne’s Botanicals while the two were vending side-by-side at the Golden Evening market. The restaurant didn’t make it through the pandemic, but Abenoja took that as her cue to scale up Shop Halo Halo, selling weekly dessert boxes and appearing at Portland markets.
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So, she started teaching herself how to make traditional Filipino pastries and began making desserts at a pan-Asian restaurant. “Despite having a fairly large Filipino population here, there aren’t too many places that serve our food, and even fewer who focus on baked goods and desserts,” Abenoja says. When she moved to Portland in 2012, she had trouble finding the Filipino baked goods she grew up with and craved them. Those formative years helping them prepare for family gatherings led her toward a career in the food industry. When the bakery opens, customers will enjoy treats like ube cheese pandesal, bibingka, leche flan, and blueberry calamansi cheesecake, in addition to the namesake dessert.Īs a child, Abenoja learned how to cook alongside her mother and lola, or grandmother. Halo-halo, a popular cold Filipino dessert, also translates to “mix-mix”-Abenoja chose the name for her business to reflect the mix of traditional desserts and modern pastries she makes. After hours, the space will be made available to the community for events and gatherings. With Shop Halo Halo, she hopes to create a space that centers and uplifts the Filipino community where folks can learn about Filipino culture and history through food. Shop Halo Halo will be located in a brand-new building on Southeast Woodstock Boulevard and 50th Avenue - a “warm, living and breathing space” with natural elements and foliage that “pay homage to my family’s ancestral land between the sea and the mountains,” in her words.
This winter, Abenoja will help expand the range of what Filipino food looks like in Portland, transforming her pop-up into a community cafe and bakery with an attached plant shop from Daphne’s Botanicals. Even in Portland, a lot of Filipinos in the area are working class and recent immigrants.” “In the countryside, the majority of our population is living day to day, maybe even getting one meal a day. “There’s a lot of eyes on the fine dining realm in regards to Filipino cuisine, which is amazing, but it feels almost wrong to not loop in that so many of our people don’t actually eat like this,” Abenoja says. But baker Geleen Abenoja - the woman behind Filipino pastry pop-up Shop Halo Halo - wants to diversify and explore the other facets of Pinoy dining and culture she sees as underrepresented. Within recent years, that has started to change: Filipino chefs have opened more restaurants, food carts, and other food businesses around the city, from star food cart Baon Kainan to lauded chef Carlo Lamagna’s Magna Kusina. Just a few decades ago, Filipino restaurants were a relative rarity in Portland proper - as well as other areas around the country.
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