Meet Gabriel Tungol | Creator & Cook of Barangay ATL

We had the good fortune of connecting with Gabriel Tungol and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Gabriel, what role has risk played in your life or career?

As a young person, I envisioned (and subsequently constructed) a highly structured, conventional professional path; I attended advanced scholastic summer camps in junior high and high school, and feverishly pursued a degree in neuroscience as an undergraduate in preparation for a career in public health & medicine. In retrospect, within the context of risk management, this was essentially a way to hedge my life bets. Observing the ostensible pragmatism of my parents as a youth had inculcated a sense within me that pursuing a path of relatively guaranteed financial stability was not only practical, it was also a moral decision; it was a way to secure my ability to provide for my family in the future. And I have held no pursuit in higher esteem since I was a child than giving everything I have to become a great father and husband. So ultimately, at the time, I felt that my chosen career path was a means towards that end.

After years working in community based public health and clinical research, and obtaining my public health degree from Johns Hopkins University, I found myself working for the NYC Department of Health in the Rikers Island correctional system. It happened to be that I simultaneously and unexpectedly stumbled into an entirely different skillset through a side hustle as a strength & conditioning coach, which eventually led me to take a departure from my work. The pull of this newfound passion overtook my chosen career path, and I moved with my wife (then-girlfriend) from NYC to Portland, OR and opened a strength & conditioning gym with a college friend with an MBA who had always had an entrepreneurial mindset.

Over the next 4 years in that venture, I came to realize (with my very challenging, but perpetually illuminating dynamic with my business partner) that one of the assets I possess that had historically made me successful now also presented bottlenecks, blindspots, and weaknesses as an entrepreneur; I was always inclined to over-index planning & meticulous preparation and to try to anticipate problems and create systems & protocols to prevent (or at least mitigate) them, I was always organized. But in running a small business, where predicting outcomes & changing circumstances is next to impossible, I can see that it was slowing us down; my tendency was to be careful and to pump the brakes, when often it probably would have made more sense to press the gas and simply focus on real-time execution rather than planning — and to embrace the infinite learning opportunities that come from pushing forward with an acceptable amount of uncertainty, occasionally stumbling or falling, but extracting wisdom from the challenges (and even mistakes) that sometimes come. It is a highly proactive process, not a passive one.

I think, on a higher level, some of that stems from a desire for control; and one of the challenges of entrepreneurship and the free market is that one’s ability to exert control on outcomes is limited. As an entrepreneur, I have come over the years, to greatly increase my risk tolerance. More to the point, I have come to a place of desiring some of those feelings; of diving in, of sensing when things are going wrong, of identifying problems or weaknesses or blindspots, and learning how I can use those things to step my game up. Instead of creating protocols and systems to prevent every problem I can anticipate (whether or not they come to pass), I now put a premium on creating protocols and systems to address actual challenges that emerge, and the wisdom that comes from this approach is fast & furious by comparison. And I love it. It energizes me.

As a small business owner now with Barangay, my hard-wiring remains the same; I am still meticulous, I still organize and prepare, I plan thoroughly. Kitchens need that, and menus benefit from it. But from a more macro standpoint, I run towards uncertainty. I am eager to find weak points and challenges. I am not fearless, but I have infinitely more courage to hunt down that which impedes my growth. I am much less risk-averse.

What should our readers know about your business?

The way I feel about it, Barangay ATL has been a long time coming; without grandiosity, I feel like it comes from a time from before I existed. It is cosmic to me. I feel like entire generations of my family clan toiled under the broiling Philippine sun to create this opportunity, this gift; my father’s side has very humble beginnings, farmers of what was at the time considered a peasant class at best. They lived hard lives, and preparing food was inextricably linked with some of the deepest elements of the human experience: of survival, of transforming the most humble ingredients into magnificence, of passing down generational knowledge skills and wisdoms, of sharing and spreading meager resources to ensure mouths are fed, of having pride in what one does and what one creates — not the pride of ego, but the kind of pride that can only come from giving everything one can muster to an effort. It is a history and a culture that I do not take lightly; it galvanizes me.

As such, it is my intention to give my very best to my food; I strive to represent my experiences, my family, and my culture with total honesty, fearlessness, and fidelity. Whether I’m putting out my take on traditional Filipino culinary classics or what I feel is a total innovation; I am giving it everything I got.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?

Real talk, I still feel hella new to Metro ATL having just moved here end of 2020. This being said, I absolutely have a “yo I bang with these places” list. It is long, but things that are top of mind:

• Food Terminal. Malaysian food is bananas, period; Food Terminal executes. Every time.
• Ming’s BBQ. Cantonese roast meats en fuego. Roast duck, char siu, roast pork, soy sauce chicken. Tremendous.
• La Mei Zi. Somehow they put out slammin Sichuan dishes AND Taiwanese dishes. We are always excited to eat their food.
• 3 Hermanos Taqueria and El Trompo. Whatever you feenin for: barbacoa, lengua, pastor, birria, asada, carnitas, cecina, suadero…. everything is bangin.
• Desta. Ethiopian food. Been fire since I was livin in Decatur back in ’06 for a few months.
• Scoville & Soul: Food & Culture. Hands down my fav fried chicken sandwiches in the game out here. I put them up against Prince’s Hot Chicken in Nashville on just pure tastiness.
• The Beltline: walkin from Krog Street Market to from Ponce City Market and grabbin drinks along the way.
• Pop’s Coffee. We miss Portland’s coffee culture (well… aight lemme rephrase that, we miss Portland’s coffeeshops and coffee roasters lol), but I always get my fix at Pop’s. Their pourover is worth the wait everytime.
• Atlanta’s incredible pop-up scene. Soup Belly ATL / So So Fed / Secret Pint BBQ / Bite of Korea / Gorditas ATL … too many to name, but these folks are doing incredible work. I’m still tryna get to some other pop-ups for the first time ATL Jerk King.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?

There is immediately a standout list of 3 much-deserved shoutouts specific to Barangay.

1. My father is from a specific region in the Philippines, often (if not generally) considered to be the culinary seat of the country: Pampanga. Without overtly intending to do so, he instilled a deep, deep reverence for our culture, our history, and our cuisine in me; I grew up in a home kitchen that made almost exclusively Filipino food. I spent my childhood watching our cuisine been cooked, asking questions about the regional origins and personal narratives of the food, looking for Filipino cookbooks, and voraciously trying every ingredient I could get my palate on during our trips to different parts of the Philippines, including my mom’s province in the Visayas. I still have hand-scrawled and typewritten (yes, with a typewriter) documents of recipes and questions I had for my pops deconstructing dishes, techniques, and rationale. Obviously my DNA literally composes half of my chromosomes — but more than that, in spirit and passion, his thumbprint is an indelible part of what I do with Filipino food. Now and forever.

2. Magna PDX is a Filipino restaurant that opened in Portland OR when we were living there between 2016-2020. I have always loved the cooks and chefs of all stripes who put Pinoy food out. The OG spots like Tito Rad’s and Krystal’s in Queens living in NYC, like Patio Filipino and Lucky Chances living in the San Francisco; both elevated restaurants like Abe and straight turo-turo joints on the street corner slangin classic dishes like sinigang or tinola in a lil plastic bag with a ball of rice for everyday folks in the Philippines. I love our hustle, our creativity, our passion. But Magna was different to me. It was a fresh, bold, unapologetic approach to our cuisine that didn’t ask for permission; it simply trusted its voice and knew what it wanted to do. It stunned me. I told everybody I could about that spot. So shoutout Carlo Lamagna in Portland, OR; he doesn’t know this, he may not remember me, but he changed my life. He changed my whole lens on what is possible, and my perspective on cultural gatekeepers and rubrics attempting to define (and confine) what is and isn’t. Man, shoutout him.

3. Estrellita is a Filipino restaurant in Grant Park here in ATL. I had just moved here from the west coast in 2020 and I was feeling so inspired by what I experienced in Portland from places like Magna PDX and Matta (a Vietnamese American food truck that was and still is absolutely bangin). Every molecule in me wanted to get involved in Filipino food, in some way and somehow. I couldn’t deny my passions for our food a moment longer. And, bless ’em, Hope & Walter (the owners) accepted a random email from me and we sat and talked back of the house Filipino kitchen stuff; I had no substantial experience working in a commercial kitchen, only a dabble in the front of the house after college at an Olive Garden. But they decided to take me on, give me a job as a cook in the back, and to see what I could contribute to their team, their restaurant, and their organization. And now we here; I just did a prix-fixe table d’hote supperclub event at their restaurant this past Sunday with two back-to-back sold out seatings, and I could not be more proud to have done it there with their support. Much love to them for what they have done to show me love, and for what they continue to do for the community at large.

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