WITH Cebu being one of the top tourism destinations in the country, a homegrown brand specializing in roasted pig or lechon is targeting domestic tourists in its bid to make its restaurant, serving its kind of lechon products, become one of the top pasalubong destinations in Cebu.
Enrico “Rico” Dionson, 3MRS Dionson Corp. founder and chief executive officer, said yesterday that they are bolstering operations of their restaurant, Rico’s Lechon, to achieve this goal.
Dionson said that they had come up with strategies to better serve the bulk of tourists, most of them coming from Manila, dropping by their restaurant to purchase lechon products as pasalubong.
“We’ve noticed that most of our customers are buying lechon to bring it to their hometowns as pasalubong, and this is becoming a trend. So we thought of coming up with a (handy) pasalubong package,” Dionson told reporters during a roundtable discussion at Rico’s Lechon in Kasambagan.
Through the pasalubong package, tourists going out of Cebu may now carry their purchased lechon products like any other securely packaged delicacies with ease and with less chance of immediate spoilage.
Along with this increase in demand, Dionson said that they’ve also added more lechon to their daily supply as demand from dine-in and to-go customers would often overlap. Rico’s Lechon normally roasts 10 to 12 whole lechon per branch on week days and 15 to 18 lechon per branch on weekends.
“We often experience a fast uptake of lechon to the point that our supply would start to run out as early as 7 p.m. There are even days when we would receive bulk orders for pasalubong from just a single customer which could go to as much as 20 kilograms. So we increased our supply by three heads (three whole roasted pigs) per branch,” Dionson said.
The 20-year-old restaurant which traces its beginnings in Barangay Talamban, Cebu City has now grown into a household name serving various recipes of roasted pig with two stand-alone stores located along the Airport Road in Lapu-Lapu City and inside The Ridges in Kasambagan, Cebu City with a combined seating capacity of 170.
The company is also set to open its biggest restaurant inside Axis Entertainment Avenue along Escario Street, Cebu City on Nov. 28.