Lola Letty’s Kitchen

Lola is what Filipino families call a grandmother, and the name on this Port Dover storefront points straight at one: Leticia Torio, known to everyone as Letty. Her son James and his wife Becky built the kitchen around the dishes she cooked at home, so the restaurant runs on an inheritance rather than a concept. That difference shows up in the details. The menu is short on purpose, the recipes come from one cook, and the operation is built to feed people the way a family kitchen does — generously, without a lot of ceremony. Order here and you are eating a grandmother's home cooking, boxed for the drive home.

The core menu holds six things and does not pretend to hold more. Lumpia arrive as crisp spring rolls stuffed with ground pork and mixed vegetables, cut with a sweet chili sauce. The Filipino pork BBQ comes on skewers the family simply calls sticks, marinated overnight before they meet the grill. Filipino fried chicken lands as a hot, crisp thigh straight from the fryer. Two adobos anchor the rice plates — chicken adobo built on bay leaves, garlic, and soy over steamed white rice, and a deeper, richer pork version beside it — while pancit pulls rice noodles and mixed vegetables together in a broth substantial enough to carry a whole order on its own. None of it is fussy, and none of it is trying to be. For anyone who cannot choose, Lola Letty's Sampler Box gathers all six into a single takeout box.

A menu this compact is a decision, not a shortfall. Everything on it travels — boxes, skewers, rolls, rice plates, fried chicken — which is exactly what a takeout-first kitchen needs, and there is no dining room or reservation line to work around. The hours are tight and weekend-weighted, Thursday through Sunday, which reads less like a constraint than like a small family operation cooking when its customers actually turn up. The sampler box does the quiet work of making the whole thing legible: rather than asking a newcomer to gamble on which Filipino staple to start with, it hands over pancit, a spring roll, a pork BBQ stick, fried chicken, pork adobo, and chicken adobo at once. At a single low price band, it is also the easiest way to feed a table without building a large order dish by dish. The short list is the point. It says the kitchen would rather cook a handful of things the way Letty cooked them than pad the board.

James Torio is Canadian-Filipino; his parents came from Aparri, on the northern coast of Cagayan. That corner of the northern Philippines is a long way from a Lake Erie beach town, and part of what the restaurant does is close the distance. Becky and James own and run the business, and local reporting credits pancit and lumpia in particular as the dishes that first drew Becky to Letty's cooking. In the Torio family the pork BBQ skewers are just sticks, the kind of shorthand that only exists in a house where the dish gets made often. The recipes are his mother's, which is why the food reads as inherited rather than assembled: the adobo, the noodles, and the overnight-marinated pork each arrive with a specific cook behind them, not a supplier's spec sheet.

Lola Letty's opened in January 2025, and its clearest nod to its town sits on the specials list. The Pork Adobo Poutine takes the family's adobo sauce and pours it over fries and Quebec cheese curds — a Filipino base in a Canadian format, which is a fair picture of what the restaurant is doing everywhere else on the menu. There is no dine-in visit to plan around it; the plan is to order, pick up or have it delivered, and eat at home, which is how the restaurant means to be used. Port Dover gets its Filipino comfort food from a counter that treats a grandmother's recipes as the standard to hit rather than a theme to dress up. The name says grandmother. The box is how it keeps its word.