Filistix owners see catering as next chapter after recent restaurant closure
Filistix closed its downtown location in January but sees The Flavour Agency catering business as a way to stay in the game after years of bad luck.
Filistix was started by Ariel del Rosario and co-owner Roel Canafranca as a food trailer in 2008. They launched Filistix kiosks at the University of Alberta and MacEwan University in 2011 and 2012, respectively, before opening a sit-down Filistix in May 2019 in the Government District. The co-owners opened Filistix to "crusade" for Filipino cuisine, del Rosario said. However, he said he thinks many diners are shy to try Asian cuisine that doesn't come from one of "the big five" countries, which are China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam.
"Right now, what we're seeing with the dining public is that they're really sticking to what they know," del Rosario said. "Now that the restaurant industry is still in recovery mode, that kind of pushed our crusading back a few years."
As dine-in and food truck sales sagged, catering requests began to climb.
"We noticed that in the last couple years that our catering business has steadily increased," del Rosario told Taproot. "People were more interested in our catering offerings than booking us for a food truck or coming into the restaurant."
The COVID-19 pandemic is a key reason the downtown Filistix closed, del Rosario said. Filistix added home delivery during the pandemic and held special events to attract diners as restrictions eased, but even today, he said, there are fewer people working in-office near the restaurant to keep it open, despite other pockets of downtown showing signs of reinvigoration.
"What we notice coming out of the pandemic is that the Government District didn't really recover as quickly as some pockets in the downtown core," del Rosario said. "For example, 104 Street seemed like it was recovering a lot quicker, and definitely in the Rice Howard Way area."
Eventually, staff and supply costs for regular operations had to go, he said, but The Flavour Agency has kept the downtown space as its kitchen and home base. There, the catering company makes signature Filistix items like adobo meat dishes and rice bowls, plus pizza, pasta, sandwiches, and custom menus for catering clients.
The Flavour Agency's broader menu was developed in part because of a series of earlier snags for Filistix. In 2018, Aramark did not renew its two university kiosk contracts. Filistix soon found another site at the U of A, but stopped operating at MacEwan until 2022. That year, del Rosario and Canafranca returned to MacEwan with the food hall Takam Market in the Robbins Health Learning Centre. It comprises a Filistix, Big Sky Sandwiches, Butta la Pasta, Takam Café, and Takam Pizza, plus a bubble tea concept called BESTEA Chill Out Café from a separate owner.
