At the Makati apartment that Crosta’s founding couple share, clumps of dough stare down at us. “How the fuck did they get there to begin with?” wonders Ingga Cabangon Chua of the Orion’s Belt of dough now fossilized on her dining room ceiling.
Her partner, Tommy Woudwyk, dates the dough cluster to Crosta prehistory, long before their “Pizza of the Year 2023” nod (awarded by actual Italians in Napoli, FYI) and further even before the endless swarm of customers and app-dispatched riders at their Makati branch, all as eager for their order as parents awaiting their kid’s name at graduation.
A good five years before Crosta became the Philippines’ most exciting purveyors of pizza, it was just Ingga living, breathing, and dreaming dough in this very apartment. “It surrounded us when we slept,” she remembers, describing tubs of dough she let ferment in their bedroom. At one point, dough was even a drinking buddy, which might explain the archaeological find on their ceiling.
‘ ‘3’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:97e3fbde-8f85-4f74-b837-cfb4bbe6fe96’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘Ingga Cabangon Chua in the apartment where her dough obsession
“What happened is one day we were drunk,” says Tommy, who often assisted Ingga with kitchen prep in those early days. Back then, their dining room was their commissary. A four-door chiller leaked water onto the hardwood floor as industrial food containers formed an assembly line on their breakfast counter. Walking inebriated one night toward an area crowded with water jugs, a slapstick scenario ensued as Tommy slipped, catapulting the roof-clinging relic we see today.
When Crosta launched in 2017 from a container van in Poblacion, demand for its pizzas grew as steadily as the party-hardy crowds that populated the area. Customers were as enthusiastic as the friends who urged Ingga to sell her pies in the first place. Some even peeked into the kitchen asking for the Italian man they pictured at the oven, surprised to find a peppy Filipino-Chinese girl dusted in flour instead. Pizza made with a little more craft and care was a rarity in the Philippines. If your pie wasn’t hastily baked and swamped in grease by a behemoth chain, you conditioned yourself to pay top peso for artisanal pizza. “We were like, ‘Holy crap, ₱900 for a pizza?’” Ingga says of the sourdough pies that Dean & Deluca launched in those pre-pandemic days. “We were slightly offended that we would pay that much just to enjoy good pizza.”
Ingga had always been on the hunt for quality pizza. Hell, it’s how she met Tommy, she says, recalling the pizzeria she frequented as a college student in Sydney, where amid lining up for a prosciutto-and-arugula-topped slice, some guy behind her had struck up a conversation. A decade later and be it Tokyo, New York, or whichever flourishing food scene the couple traveled to, pizza was always part of the itinerary. But why couldn’t amazing pizza be closer to home, she demanded. The question niggled at her until finally, the Kitchen-Aid her brother randomly gifted her one Christmas stared her in the face.
‘ ‘8’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:40e73a72-17fd-41e3-a1c0-20c3ea7477ba’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘One of five notebooks documenting the dough journey to Crosta’s
She shows me an old notebook filled with what look like Pictionary doodles. On one oil-stained page, oven temperatures are scribbled in no particular order; above, the rough drawing of a circle is pock-marked and tersely labeled “Bubble.” It documents her literal highs and lows in making pizza exactly how she wants it: crust that’s tasty even without toppings, offering char-speckled crunch that sinks into delightfully chewiness.
“There’s so much to learn and you kind of just get sucked into it,” she says. Building her know-how via Google and an old recipe from Tommy’s mom, Ingga soon became so devoted to her pizza side project, she eventually snuck it into her day job managing real estate for her father.
At Sandari, their residential development in Batangas, she lured clients into a sales pavilion with the promise of brick-oven pizza. Back then, her crust resembled the dormant volcano that bordered Sandari, a hulking mass with barely any room for toppings. Still, customers kept coming back, some even leaving with a house and lot to-go. Ingga laughs, recalling the walk-in customer who dined and bought property in the process (“I called my dad and said, ‘Hey dad, we ROI’d!’”)
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