The Claudio Ranallo Memorial Award for Chef with Heart honours a chef who embodies the spirit of Claudio Ranallo—the late chef and owner of La Piazza Dario—by giving back to the community with care and working tirelessly behind the scenes without asking for accolades.
The Inaugural Chef with Heart Winner Is… Chef TJ Conwi
Ono Vancouver
onovancouver.com
When Vancouver’s Filipino community was reeling from the tragedy of the Lapu Lapu Day Festival in 2025, chef TJ Conwi wasted no time in rolling up his sleeves and getting to work at cooking meals for the families of the victims. But really, it was no surprise: the longtime chef of Filipino heritage has made a habit of dedicating his impressive culinary skills to giving back. He’s the perfect fit for the first-ever Chef with Heart award.
Conwi came up in the kitchen of Vancouver’s exclusive Arbutus Club in the early aughts and later sharpened his craft as executive chef at Delta Hotels Vancouver Downtown Suites (even catering for Oprah herself at one point), but he was finding the work unfulfilling. In 2018, a switch in direction to running his own catering and consulting business, Ono Vancouver, gave him the freedom to launch new projects that would truly fill him up. With the proceeds from Ono, he started ReRoot, a food rescue operation that turns surplus food into pre-made frozen meals, and LunchLAB, a school program that mentors budding chefs as they prepare nourishing meals for their peers. Today, he continues to run those programs, while also donating his time to mentor up-and-coming chefs in the industry. Conwi encourages others to give back, too: his charitable collaborative dinner series, A Night of Too Many Chefs, enlists several chefs across Vancouver to provide gourmet-calibre meals for those in need. “We call it dignity in the bowl,” he says.
