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Sixteen years is a long time for a restaurant.
Long enough to see a neighborhood change around it. Long enough for dining habits to shift, trends to come and go, and old regulars to become part of the furniture. Long enough, too, to find out whether a restaurant has enough of a reason for people to keep coming back.
Dillingers has had all of that.
The Makati restaurant and bar, which opened in 2010, is celebrating its 16th anniversary this October with a refreshed menu, a new culinary direction, and plans to expand beyond its Greenbelt home.
But the more interesting story is what happened before the celebration.
According to Dillingers president Sean Fariñas, the restaurant’s early years were loud and crowded, with customers sometimes spilling into the mall hallway. By around its eighth year, however, the crowds had thinned considerably. There were nights when only a handful of loyal regulars remained.
Then things started moving in the other direction.
Before the pandemic, new customers began finding Dillingers through online videos praising the restaurant for its food, particularly its steaks, and its value. Then COVID-19 arrived, and the restaurant faced the possibility of closing for good.
“We had a week’s worth of inventory sitting in the kitchen and absolutely zero sales,” Fariñas said.
Rather than let the food go to waste, the restaurant cooked it, packed the meals, and donated them to hospital frontliners. At a time when its own future was uncertain, it still found a way to feed people.
Dillingers survived.
Customers gradually returned, and in its 14th year, Fariñas decided the restaurant needed another gamble. He renovated the space despite questions about why it needed to change when things were already going well enough. According to Fariñas, longtime customers returned, new customers came in, and sales eventually tripled.
That history makes the restaurant’s 16th anniversary more interesting than a simple milestone.
After 16 years of changing with its diners, surviving a pandemic, and reinventing its space, Dillingers is once again betting on what comes next.
The next phase includes a new location in Nuvali, Laguna, targeted to open in the fourth quarter of 2026, as well as Room 1903, a new concept targeted for late in the fourth quarter.
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The food is changing, too.
Corporate chef Kevin Villarica, who now leads Dillingers’ culinary direction, sees that evolution as necessary. In an exclusive interview with ABS-CBN, he said a new chapter should come with “a willingness to change.”
“The diners coming in today are different,” Villarica said. “They’re curious, more knowledgeable about food, and they’re looking for something that feels both authentic and exciting.”
The expansion is also what excites Villarica about Dillingers’ next chapter.
“It gives us an opportunity to take everything that the Dillingers team learned over the past 16 years and build on it, not to change Dillingers’ identity, but to discover what else it can become,” he said.
He wants longtime diners to retain that sense of familiarity while giving first-time visitors a reason to come back.
“I want the guests who have been with us from the beginning to walk in and still feel that sense of familiarity and comfort. But I also want someone experiencing Dillingers for the first time to feel that there’s something here for them. To feel welcomed, surprised, and excited to come back.”
That is a difficult balance for any restaurant that has been around this long. Dillingers has an established identity built around American-inspired food, steaks, comfort food, cocktails, and the social side of dining. The question now is how much it can add without losing what already works.
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I’ve spent September eating my way through food events. The best thing I tasted all month? Mashed potatoes.
I was at Dillingers’ 16th anniversary media preview, with steaks on the table, drinks in hand, and plenty of familiar names around the room. I was probably more self-conscious than I needed to be. Then I tasted the potatoes and, for a few minutes, that was pretty much all I cared about.
They were smooth and creamy without becoming gluey, rich with butter, and properly seasoned. They were the kind of potatoes you could keep eating without thinking about it, which is probably the highest compliment I can give them. Richard Gutierrez was in the same room, yet I still found myself paying more attention to what was on my table.
The simplest things rarely announce themselves. They just have to be done exceptionally well. Those potatoes stayed with me for precisely that reason. Dillingers can keep evolving, adding new ideas and reaching new diners, while still understanding that some of the things people return for do not need to be reinvented.
Fariñas’ own account of Dillingers’ history makes the stakes clear. The restaurant has already gone through the packed years, the quiet years, the online rediscovery, a pandemic that nearly ended it, and a renovation that changed its trajectory.
Now comes expansion.
“After 16 years, the best way we can honor everything this brand has been through is not simply to preserve it,” Fariñas said. “It’s to grow it.”
For Dillingers, that growth now means taking what has worked for 16 years and finding out where it can go next.