I visited Aylesbury's newest restaurant - here's what it has to offer

Over the Easter weekend, Lola Maria’s Catering, opened a new restaurant in Long Lional, just around the corner from Market Square.

It is the first restaurant to open in Buckinghamshire and surrounding areas specialising in producing Filipino food and is an expansion on an already established cuisine company.

Owner and head chef, Arthur Gopilan, previously ran a catering company serving specialist dishes across the country. He made regular visits to London and was also hired to cook up the food events as far afield as Manchester.

Arthur’s reputation locally has also been enhanced by support he offered to emergency workers during the pandemic. To help out his wife Charito, who works as a nurse at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, he made meals for her and her colleagues to eat at the end of their shifts. It was the positive feedback he received from staff at the hospital that convinced him to continue working in hospitality when the world reopened.

In its current guise Lola Maria’s Catering, which has taken over the town centre unit vacated by Sri Lankan food specialists Herali, runs a lunchtime collection service and dine-in eating in the evenings. Every day at lunch guests can pick up a hot meal for £8 from an ever-changing menu of Asian specialities, and guests can sit down for more traditional Filipino dishes in the evening.

It is truly a family-run venture Arthur runs the kitchen alongside his oldest son Jose Alberto, and when The Bucks Herald visited the youngest of six Gopilan children had been receiving till training. Charito is also looking after customers in the restaurant while still working shifts at Aylesbury’s hospital.

Arthur says Filipino food is best thought of as a mix between Spanish food and Chinese dishes. He noted that in the first month since opening, a lot of the store’s customers have come from outside of the county town. He is particularly proud of a visitor from London who came to the store 12 years after first enjoying Arthur’s cooking as a child; that customer was now 19 years old.

More information on the new store can be found on the business’s Facebook page here.