January 30, 2017

Meet Charm Dy of Corazon’s Custom Catering in West LA

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Charm Dy.

Charm, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
We are relatively a new comer and us starting our Filipino catering company has a back story of me, Charm, opening up a business with the support of my family after I graduated Culinary Arts. Cooking and love for food runs in our family but at first, I was not interested at all. It was enough for me knowing that we owned a family restaurant back home. It came to a surprise to my family when I decided to take up Food Science in college. The plan was to finish Food Science and then take up Culinary Arts afterwards but things took a turn when we decided to move here from the Philippines. My usual routine was long gone and I just completed 2 years out of 4 from the university and I needed to start again. I decided to switch it up, do Culinary Arts first then finish my degree. Later on, while taking up classes, I found myself staging at a French bistro in Culver City under the supervision of a very good chef. I fell in love with the cuisine, of course, what’s not to love, almost everything is with butter and you can never go wrong with it. After graduating culinary school, a family friend asked us to present a menu for her 60th birthday. My business partner, Johanna, my aunt as well, gave her the idea of serving hors d oeuvres instead of typical Filipino catered food but still incorporate Filipino flavors to it and luckily she agreed to it. That’s our starting point, that’s how Corazon’s was born, the concept, the logo, and the story. We named the catering company under our matriarch – my grandmother, Corazon, with that said, we even asked her to write up her name and we used it for our logo. That was just the first step of the other many steps that we undertook to put our company out there.

Has it been a smooth road?
As a new business, it was never a smooth road. Our struggles when we were starting were finding and maintaining a good roster of clients, the perfect timing, advertisements, ‘how to’s and to cater for them, our personal time and space to name a few. At first, it was hard to find the good clients. It was like they were hiding or shying away from us. The next one was the timing, for me, it was somewhat like our “waiting game” or “grace period”. especially when we placed our ad for the first few months on our church circular. We hoped that maybe someone will call us and inquire, just an inquiry was good enough for me because we were somehow getting noticed. Several months passed by but were not lucky, eventually, we had to cancel our subscription which was accumulating bills as well. We also had our questions like ‘how do we do this? how do we get to cater to offices or studios or production companies?’. We don’t have the right connections yet during that time. Lastly, our personal time and space, it was becoming hard for us to differentiate it, especially that we are also a family in this business. Plus, I was working full time too, that’s why I even had that feeling that I was neglecting the business as well because my full attention was with the company. Those are just a few of our struggles both on the business and personal side.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with Corazon’s Custom Catering – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Corazon’s Custom Catering is a company that was built around family and food. On our back story on our Instagram page, I mentioned that we are “three generations of kitchen stories, food, and family” and this best describes us. We specialized in Filipino cuisine with a twist as I may say. We combine locally sourced food and various cooking techniques to showcase Filipino flavors from the classic home cooked food to innovative flavors that would suit the palate of our new millennials. Coming from me, what sets us apart from different caterers are the flavors and the recipes that we showcase. It may be new to their palate but we are here to make it easier for them to accept the flavor that we are introducing. To show our innovative recipes and flavors, we joined a food expo called “Crave”. In this trade, we were given the opportunity to let everyone taste the Filipino flavors; we twisted our Filipino grandmother’s classics like chicken adobo and beef kalderetta to an upgraded and new version of it like the chicken adobo turnover with our salted egg relish and beef kalderetta bourguignon in potato pancake. We even coined a new term for our company to describe our offering, “glocal” – locally grown food and flavors that will or are acceptable to the global palate.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
What we like best about our city is that everyone is given the opportunity to shine or showcase our talent or what we offer. Though there are many up and coming restaurants or caterers around here, the Filipino cuisine is somewhat making a name already. Though we may not be the pioneer but we are definitely on the bandwagon to make our cuisine known. What I like least about our city, is somehow not recognizing our cuisine enough.

Contact Info: