The Pig and Palm

The Room

The Pig and Palm opened in 2015 in Cebu's IT Park business district as the first Southeast Asian project from British chef Jason Atherton, whose Pollen Street Social in London holds a Michelin star and whose restaurant portfolio spans London, Dubai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Sydney. The Cebu restaurant is named for the pig (the dominant protein in Filipino cooking) and the palm (the tree that shades every Cebuano memory of summer). It is a statement by a globally-significant chef that Cebu is worth opening a restaurant in.

The menu is modern Spanish tapas filtered through Atherton's technical grammar. The signature dishes include roast suckling pig (served Segovia-style with apple and Iberico jus), the pork terrine with fig mustard, the curried grouper with coconut, and a rotating selection of bar-level tapas designed to pair with the restaurant's Spanish-leaning wine list. The food is technically excellent, the sourcing is local where quality allows and imported where it demands, and the portion structure is designed for long conversational dinners.

The room is brick-and-wood, pub-like, more casual than Atherton's London flagships but carrying the same service calibration. The bar seats twelve; the dining room seats perhaps forty. The atmosphere is loud-warm rather than quiet-formal — this is a restaurant designed for conversation, for ordering-across-the-table, for the long business dinner that ends in an agreement rather than the silent high-formal meal that ends in ceremony.

Pricing sits around $60-100 per person for a full tapas-and-mains progression with wine. For Cebu, this is top tier; for an Atherton restaurant, this is remarkable value. The wine list leans Spanish with a broader Old World page; cocktails are sharp and competent. Reservations are essential Friday and Saturday; mid-week walk-ins often work at the bar.