A Family Affair Filipino restaurant downtown serving customers

Filipino culture and food can be found in downtown Rocky Mount at Kabayan Bites.

Kabayan Bites, which is Rocky Mount’s first Filipino restaurant, is in the 100 block of Southeast Main Street and on the east side of the CSX rail line between Hill and Tarboro streets.

It’s a family operation, with Jm Yravin Gaspar in charge and getting help from her mother, Marynol Gaspar, a third grade mathematics teacher at Middlesex Elementary School.

One of Kabayan Bites’ enthusiastic customers is Rocky Mount Mayor Sandy Roberson.

“I’m telling you, it has just been fantastic,” Roberson said over the phone on Wednesday afternoon of his experience getting food via takeout or dining in.

“I give it a two-thumbs up,” Roberson said.

Roberson also spoke about the continuing redevelopment of downtown.

The mayor said that a vision started with then-interim City Manager Peter Varney to create a concentration of restaurants in the heart of Rocky Mount.

“Anywhere that you create that density of restaurants and these little bistros, you’ll create some traffic down there,” Roberson said. “It’s a good complement to what we’re trying to do downtown already.”

Additionally, Roberson said that Rocky Mount has a growing Filipino population.

“A lot of our teachers are Filipino,” Roberson said.

Roberson said that about four or five years ago, he was invited to a Christmas party where about 20 Filipinos were gathering.

The mayor went this past year “and if there weren’t 200, I’d be surprised,” he said of the gathering.

“And most of them were teachers,” he said, adding that they were working in the school systems in Edgecombe and Nash counties or further east.

Kabayan Bites is open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sundays and from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. on the other days of the week.