Chef Boy is the second child in the brood of eight of fisherman Justaniano Logro and wife Consorcia , Chef Boy had very humble beginnings. The family lived in a small house by the sea, where the young boy could hear – and even feel – splashing of waves.
Chef Boy did get to study, but he never got to high school because his parents could no longer afford to send him to school. Nurturing the dream of going back to school and somehow improving the quality of his family’s life, he at the age of 13, went with his uncle to Manila to work and earn living.
His first job was a houseboy in a Chinese Restaurant in downtown Quiapo. He did not know how to speak Tagalog. His salary was P50 a month for cleaning all three floors of his master’s house and for going to Quinta Market Daily. Chef Boy is industrious and creative, he did not waste the opportunity to learn. After cleaning the house, he would go down to the restaurant and help out in the kitchen, kneading dough’s for siopao and assisting the chef cook lechon kawali. Since he was only learning to speak in Tagalog, he would at night, get a notebook and draw the vegetables that he saw in the kitchen, give them his own names to them, and make illustrations on how to cut and cook them.
