Stories

Sydney Cebu Lechon

Across the Table
Interviews with Welcome Merchant food vendors at Powerhouse Lane. Words by Ann Ding and Shivika Gupta
Lechon, Sydney Cebu Lechon and Lugaw Queen – Powerhouse Lane, Parramatta, 2024. Image: Ethan Smart

Powerhouse Lane was a celebration of the culinary and musical landscape of Western Sydney presented across four flavoursome nights on George Street at Parramatta Lanes in late October 2024.

As part of the festival, Powerhouse commissioned fbi.radio’s Snack Time team, led by presenters and food enthusiasts Ann Ding and Shivika Gupta, to conduct an interview series with Marjorie Tenchavez, founder of award-winning social enterprise Welcome Merchant, alongside four renowned local food vendors. Presented here is Across the Table: Sydney Cebu Lechon.

Powerhouse Lane is proudly funded by the NSW Government in association with City of Parramatta Council and Powerhouse.

‘If you put one charcoal less or one charcoal over you could undercook it ... It’s not a gas oven where you just set the dial.’
Will Mahusay, Sydney Cebu Lechon, 2024
A vendor in a blue ‘Champion’ T-shirt grills skewers of meat over an open flame, holding one skewer while managing another on the grill with a pair of tongs.
A smiling street vendor wearing a black baseball cap and a blue-lettered ‘BLACK MAMBA’ T-shirt stands, preparing skewers of grilled meat at a food stall.
Close-up view of a black-attired street vendor in white plastic gloves who brushes glaze onto a large piece of bony meat that sits on the grill of a barbecue.
A person with shoulder-length hair wearing a black top and an apron smiles while stirring a large pot at a food stall surrounded by cooking items.

Sydney Cebu Lechon has been a family affair for more than three decades. In the 1990s, as a high schooler, Will Mahusay would watch his father Fred brine and prepare Filipino whole suckling pigs to be roasted over charcoal. The work was intense, physical and technical; Will found himself intrigued, but not enough to entice him away from his teenage freedom just yet.

As an adult, Will became his father’s apprentice. He spent four years learning the ins and outs of fine-tuning heat and height in his father’s custom-built charcoal oven to achieve the perfect lechon: juicy, yielding roast meat and glassy crispy skin. He calls it an absolute ‘umami bomb’.

Sydney Cebu Lechon appeared at Powerhouse Lane alongside Blacktown neighbours and Filipino BBQ specialists Lugaw Queen, who offered attendees a taste of a range of Filipino street food staples including BBQ skewers, smoky ribs and crispy pork sisig.