MANILA -- Tina Santos, the Tina in Mom and Tina’s Bakery Café is fidgeting in her seat before settling into position. She has a jolly face, the kind that you know laughs and smiles a lot, but in that particular moment though, she had earnest eyebrows, looking at me expectantly, and rather nervously.

Which begs the question: Why would someone like Tina Santos, the creative brain behind the highly successful restaurant chain, be nervous?

I watch her profile when she speaks. She’s animated, but there’s a certain shyness, perhaps because when she talks business, she has to open up about her personal life as Mom and Tina’s is decidedly a family-affair.

Santos’ food story reads like a fairy tale. Her family has always been involved with food, as her father owned Panciteria San Jacinto, now known as Comida China.

“Why don’t you put up your own [business] with your mom?” was her dad’s question that started it all.

Starting with a small counter in Pasig in 1996, Santos sold home-baked goods, while her mother, Belen Torres, sold gift items like patchwork and quilted pillows.

She remembers their expansion to be slow but steady. It seems to be so long ago for her -- she looks pensive as she tries to remember more details.

“We decided to put up a small eating place in the back," she narrates of their first year. "We put a few tables, and we put shelves for all the other gift items.”

Most of the popular items in their early years are still the bestsellers today. Santos served small casseroles of roast beef and lasagna, and her desserts, like her chocolate cake, were already very popular even then.

From tables at the back, they expanded again with a small function room in the same building. The response was good, and they enjoyed healthy sales, especially during the holidays.

INSTANT SUCCESS

The turning point came because of a sad event in the family. After the death of her father, Santos and her mom decided to put up their first bakery café in 1997.

“We gambled,” she recalls.

The 160-seater Mom and Tina’s Bakery Café in Pasig opened and enjoyed instant success. They opened a function room at the second floor, which until now serves as a popular venue for baptisms and small events.

Santos seems to relive their “instant” success when she says, “Ang daming customers, sobra!” in a somewhat disbelieving tone, perhaps faintly echoing the surprise and delight that she had so long ago, when she first saw the queue of people lining up to eat in her restaurant.

Her surprise might also be due to the fact that Santos is not a trained chef. While she studied Hotel and Restaurant Management in college, she is adamant in saying that she is not a chef. “A baker, yes, but not a chef,” she stresses.

While much of Mom and Tina’s success comes from its baked goods, it also developed a loyal following for its savory dishes, most of which are heirloom recipes of her family. “That’s the food we eat at home,” she notes.

This largely explains why Mom and Tina’s menu is so varied, covering comfort dishes from American to Filipino. Whatever is in the menu is a reflection of her family’s tastes.

FAMILY RECIPES

“We don’t serve food that we don’t like to eat,” she adds. “It takes me a long time to put out new stuff because it’s something that everybody gets to taste at home. We’re 60 [in the family], and if somebody says it’s not good, it won’t be served here.”

And this family-centric-ness explains a lot about Mom and Tina’s “country” branding as well.

“All our houses are country [themed]. If you go to my house, it looks like the Pasig branch,” she says.

When asked what she enjoys the most about having Mom and Tina’s, Santos quickly answers, “I get to work with my nieces and nephews.”

Santos then paints a beautiful story on how they were there with her from the start, helping her pack her home-baked products long ago.

These days, Santos oversees the commissary while her nieces and nephews handle the daily operations in Mom and Tina’s four branches, with one coming soon in Greenhills.

WHAT’S NEXT?

And while there are persistent franchise inquires, Santos declares that, as of the moment, it’s not in her book.

“We have so many products, I cannot imagine franchising, and you have to teach the owner that you can’t scrimp on this, or how to store each item. It’s impossible to keep everything right,” she explains.

This level of certainty on what she wants to give her clients is clear to all her nieces and nephews. It’s the same focus that has made her restaurants flourish despite increased competition, and all the new food trends.

“Always keep your food tasting good,” she says, as she credits this philosophy in propelling the continued success of Mom and Tina’s Bakery Café.

When you praise her about her food though -- for example, I mention my go-to dish in the restaurant has always been Shepherd’s Pie -- she looks embarrassed. There’s pride, for sure, but overall, I sense joy mixed in with shyness.

There are stories of people coming up to her and saying, “Finally I get to meet you!” and her initial reaction has always been to ask, “Why?”

Which says a lot about Santos as a person: she doesn’t realize how amazing it is to meet Tina of Mom and Tina’s, and how her restaurant has had an impact to a lot of people -- how someone in the throes of troubled times find comfort in her food; or how to many wannabe or starting restaurateurs, she and her family have become truly an inspiration.

In the end, like many “instant” fairy tales of success, her story goes beyond food; it is one about hard work and creative savvy, mixed in with heaps of family love.