After 50 years, Lydia is still cooking ‘lechon’

MANILA, Philippines - When we talk of lechon, one name comes to the minds of every Filipino here and abroad: Lydia’s Lechon.

Lydia Pasion-De Roca was only 12 when she started selling lechon along the sidewalks of Baclaran in 1965 and named her business “Lydia’s Lechon.”

Nanay Lydia, or Aling Lydia, as her loyal patrons fondly call her, set up a small stall in Baclaran with a meager P500 as capital. Armed with persistence, courage, consistency and passion, De Roca was able to entice famous people to try her lechon, like the late ex-President Ferdinand Marcos and his family, Henry Sy of SM, and other famous personalities in the media, film and business industry who all happened to be devotees of Baclaran Church. Even the first James Bond, Sean Connery, had a chance to taste her delectable lechon and was all praises.

From sidewalk stallto household name

While she was working hard to uplift her family financially, De Roca, an ardent devotee of Baclaran Church, never missed a single novena or Mass since she started her business While she admits that it was through hard work and guts that Lydia’s became a household name in lechon, she believes that her prayers were also being answered. “You can’t just work and work,” she explains in the vernacular. “You need to know how to pray. And you can’t just pray and pray; you have to work. And you can’t just talk and talk, because whatever you order your employees to do you need to know how to do yourself. So even if Lydia’s is turning 50, I haven’t stopped working: cooking, choosing the pigs and the ingredients, even roasting and chopping the lechon. I don’t want to rest at home. I will get weak. I only sleep a few hours. At 5 a.m. I’m awake and go directly to Baclaran. And not only that, I go around the other branches to make sure the food our customers eat is good.”

Trials by fire

Just like other entrepreneurs, Lydia has had her own fair share of trials. One was when her son Ricky got sick and had to be admitted to the hospital. “The hospital didn’t want to admit him because I had no money to deposit,” she recalls. “But I said I could pay for it. With God’s mercy I was able to gradually pay off our debt to the hospital.”

And it wasn’t just the hospital; the same issue came up with school tuition, but Lydia persevered until she could send both her sons to a good school.

At first she couldn’t even afford to buy a TV, one of her simple pleasures that she dreamed of giving her children, but convinced the owner of the store that she would pay him back. He ended up giving her an installment plan.

Since Lydia’s Lechon is a family business, questions about infighting and factions among family members come up, but Lydia ensures that her children will not fight over what they have now. She wants to perpetuate the legacy of Lydia’s, which she painstakingly built over the past 50 years and hopes to continue till the next generation. 

“There’s no sulking or envy among us,” she says. We work together as a team and we don’t want to break up the family. What’s important is, no matter what their plans are for the future, I know it’s for the good of Lydia’s.”