When Christina Lorenzo boarded a flight from the Philippines to Florida in 2003, she had $20 on her and luggage packed with two weeks’ worth of instant noodles and Spam.
In Manila, where Lorenzo was born and raised, she’d applied for a job with the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Orlando. Once she got it, her family was worried it could be a scam, so her grandmother sent her with a supply of food just in case. Lorenzo’s uncle had given her $100 for the journey but she handed $80 of it to her grandmother.
To her relief, it wasn’t a scam. Instead, Lorenzo worked eight hours a day cleaning 13 to15 hotel rooms for $8 per hour. “My first paycheck I sent to my grandmother,” she says. It was the start of a career in the hospitality she continues as a single mother of two, commuting weekly to Marin, where she works days as a hotel barista and nights at a wine bar. Back in Humboldt on Fridays, she preps and cooks for Saturday’s Arcata Farmers Market, where she operates Christina’s Filipino Cuisine.
Lorenzo recalls taking her children to the market and seeing all the stalls, all the vendors and farmers helping each other with local ingredients. With nobody selling the Filipino food she grew up with, she also saw an opportunity. So she got all her permits and paperwork in line, and applied for a spot at the market, landing on the on-call waiting list.
Three and a half years ago, a slot opened and she grabbed it, hauling the cheapest tent she could find at Walmart to the plaza for the winter market. “I feel like my booth looks bum,” she remembers thinking, but all the chicken adobo and lumpia she cooked sold out that first day.
Lorenzo learned to make traditional Filipino meals from her grandmother in the family’s small kitchen on a stove she says was similar to a camping stove. “You gather the wood, you light it up and you cook everything from there,” she says, adding that like most people in Manila, her family was very poor. With no measuring cups, “We just go with our palate,” she says, adjusting flavors by tasting and making rice by measuring the water against the first knuckle of their middle fingers.
It’s the same method Lorenzo uses for Christina’s, eyeballing and sampling to get the tang of vinegar and smokiness of the soy sauce right. “I go batch by batch,” she says, even though it takes longer to cook large quantities. “If I go larger amount, it’s not gonna taste the same.” She laughs at herself for choosing all the extra work. “What’s important to me is the supporters, all the people that support me in the Arcata Market,” people she doesn’t want to let down. “You can get the adobo recipe online, probably, but it’s the person who cooks it.”
Those new to the stand might consider the stewed chicken adobo and lumpia combination ($17.99). She makes her adobo with a soy sauce and apple cider vinegar base, for a “cleaner and tastier” flavor, along with bay leaves and peppercorn. The bone-in chicken simmers for an hour before she shreds it for serving; by then it falls easily from the bone. She makes the lumpia filling with ground beef from Bear River Valley Beef Co. in Ferndale (one of the market vendors) and more vegetable than is typical, including shredded green and purple cabbage, carrots, cilantro and sometimes celery. The sauce on the side is a blend of sweet chili sauce and Filipino flavors, but she plans to make a more traditional version with bright, citrus calamansi fruit.
As she gets more help, Lorenzo looks forward to adding pancit fried noodles, calamansi-spiked meat dish sisig and lesser-known dishes as well. (Though a whole pig lechon is probably too ambitious.)
As the busy season of festivals winds down, Christina’s Filipino Cuisine tent — upgraded to a red and blue number since her early days — will be at the Lumberjack Weekend Block Party at Cal Poly Humboldt on Saturday, Oct. 4, and at Fortuna’s Apple Harvest Festival on the same day under the trusted hand of Nicole Gradin. Then it’s back to the Winter Market on the Arcata Plaza where she started.
Even when she’s on her own cooking and serving, Lorenzo says she never feels far from the family that sent her off to the U.S. decades ago, despite her grandmother’s death. “I talk to them in my heart when I’m working to get ready,” she says. “I feel like my grandma is tapping my head, like, ‘It’s not right. Go and do it again.’”
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
This article appears in Red-Light Women, Part II.