Charles Olalia just left one of Dallas’s most storied kitchens, and the story of how he got there in the first place is most of the reason this move matters.
Olalia grew up in Pampanga, a region of the Philippines known as the country’s food capital, born into a family of doctors who assumed he’d follow the same path. He didn’t. At 20 he enrolled in culinary school in Manila without knowing how to dice an onion, and by 21 he’d moved to the United States, reasoning that staying home would leave him too comfortable to push himself. His first job was at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay. From there he worked his way through some of the most demanding kitchens in the country — Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in Napa, Guy Savoy’s namesake restaurant in Las Vegas, Daniel Patterson’s Coi in San Francisco — before landing at Patina, the restaurant inside Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, where he rose from sous chef to chef de cuisine to executive chef in four years. He hit that title by 30.
By his own account, none of it filled a specific hunger. He’d spent a decade cooking French technique and still missed the food he grew up eating. In 2015 he opened RiceBar, a seven-seat lunch counter in downtown Los Angeles built around heirloom Filipino rice bowls, and three years later followed it with Ma’am Sir in Silver Lake, a full-service restaurant serving pig ear, sweetbreads, and sisig alongside pandan old-fashioneds. Both restaurants landed at the center of a real shift in how American diners understood Filipino food, moving it out of the category of comfort food and into rooms where a chef with Michelin-level training was putting his full technique behind it.
Olalia moved to Dallas in 2021 to become culinary director for MakeReady Experience, overseeing the food programs across the group’s properties including the Adolphus Hotel. In October 2023 he took over as executive chef of The Mansion Restaurant at the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek, one of the most historically significant dining rooms in the city, previously helmed by chefs including Dean Fearing and John Tesar. Olalia’s version folded Filipino technique into the Mansion’s classic register — lobster and shrimp lumpia with caviar, a chilled melon soup built on coconut, galangal, and calamansi, salt served in cracked clay pots inspired by his heritage — while keeping the tortilla soup that regulars have ordered for decades.
Now he’s stepping into a different kind of role. Katz Bros Hospitality, the group behind Beverley’s, Clifton Club, Green Point Seafood & Oyster Bar, and Claremont, has named Olalia culinary director, putting him over menu direction, kitchen operations, and staff mentorship across all four restaurants.
There’s a real thread connecting Olalia to the family running this group. Greg Katz, who founded the company with his brother Nik, started his own career as a teenager peeling shrimp and potatoes at The Mansion under Dean Fearing — the same restaurant Olalia is stepping away from as executive chef. The Katz brothers built their restaurants around their own family history: Beverley’s is named for their mother, Clifton Club and Green Point take their names from Cape Town neighborhoods tied to the family’s South African roots, and Claremont is named for the suburb where their paternal grandparents lived. Greg Katz has said he and Olalia have known each other for years, which makes this less a hire from outside and more a homecoming inside Dallas’s own restaurant community.
“Having Charles as our culinary director signals a shift in the way we’re moving forward,” Katz said in a statement announcing the move. He added that a new project from the group will be announced soon, without offering details on what it is or whether it will carry any of Olalia’s Filipino background into it.
Beyond Dallas, Olalia remains chef and partner on three restaurant concepts in Australia — Finn Poké, Two Yolks, and Daily Greens — which puts his cooking on two continents at once. He lives in Dallas with his wife, Yvina, and their two children.
