Syracuse's Golden Ticket

For the chef behind Syracuse’s Filipino-fusion restaurant, no pipe dream is too far out of reach.

Story by Tess Berger | Photos by Qian Zhu

When Azella Alvarez first launched Oompa Loompyas in 2014, she was frying up Filipino ground beef-filled egg rolls called lumpias and serving them alongside Syracuse food truck vendors. But unlike her fellow mobile restauranteurs, Alvarez wasn’t operating her business out of a cramped truck — she was working from a canopy tent. “I was the only caterer that didn't have a food truck, but I was tagging along with all the food trucks ‘cause I felt that there was no barrier,” Alvarez says. “I put a tent up, and I was just like, ‘Let's do this! I got it.’”

Since then, Alvarez, a first-generation Filipino-American, has moved her business out from underneath a tent and into a quaint storefront on Burnet Avenue. There in her restaurant, Alvarez proudly shares fusion cuisine that pays homage to her own family recipes while embracing the American dishes she has grown to love. From spinach artichoke lumpias to burgers nestled on traditional Filipino buns, Alvarez seamlessly melds her complex cultural flavors.

Alvarez first launched Oompa Loompyas in 2014, serving Filipino-fusion food under a canopy tent alongside food trucks. Since then, her business has moved into a storefront on Burnet Avenue.

“It was always instilled in me to want to cook,” Alvarez says. She grew up in San Diego, where her mom divvied up her time baking and managing a bus terminal. At the terminal, she began to notice the travelers’ demand for snacks. “My mom started bringing in her pastries. So we were making these out of our house, and I was alongside, 8 years old, buttering my mom's buns, sugaring them up,” Alvarez says. “We had like an assembly line.”

From her childhood sous chef days to becoming the owner of Oompa Loompyas, Alvarez has always admired her mother’s knack for cooking and baking. “She’s like a wizard at what she does, and we never learned the technical part of it, we just watched her,” Alvarez says. “And it happened every day. We based everything around food.”

While Alvarez hopes to one day sell her mother’s award-winning pastries — her orange chiffon cake won the Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest — she’s changing up the menu, adding at least two more lumpia variations: a dessert variety and another fusion. She also plans to debut a new lumpia flavor at this June’s Taste of Syracuse festival, her fifth time as a vendor.

Alvarez is set on transitioning back into the food truck scene down the road — sans tent this time. “So food truck's in the works, and the long-term goal is to be the first U.S. Filipino American to develop and distribute lumpia [in grocery stores] in the U.S. That's the ultimate goal. It's a big dream, but I think I can do it.”

Alvarez creates fusion cuisine that pays homage to family recipes while embracing American dishes she has come to love.