The cafe is owned by coffee-lovers Morten & Marichu Carstensen - an entrepreneurial couple with good taste for food and coffee.
The first established Candlelight Cafe was in Marawoy back in 2011 which was later moved to Big Ben and now in Inosluban where there is more space and peaceful surroundings.
Why "Candlelight" you may ask? The reason is that we have been in the candle industry with Doc's Candles for 16 years and have exported and retailed candles all over the world. After the recession and coupled with a fire in 2013 we decided to give the candles a rest. As paraffin wax runs in our veins we decided on the name Candlelight Cafe.
Our food is all made with passion. The white sauce for the Rigatoni tuna and ham pasta has a good story to it. Morten, back when he was 15 years old was working in Lyngby Storcenter (Denmark) in a pasta restaurant. There they drowned everything with this white sauce and people came from far away just to get their pasta and baked potatoes swimming in the sauce. So when Morten, 30 years later was going to start a cafe in Lipa he reached out to the old man Leif Francke in Denmark for the recipe. Leif was happy to share the ingredients and after a lot of testing we finally got it right and that is the white sauce we are using today.
We are pleased to welcome Girna Dela Cruz who has joined us as the Cafe Manager starting for our 2022 reboot. She has many years of experience in pastry and various Filipino dishes which you can look forward to. With Grina's help we are now offering customized cakes for birthdays and weddings. Contact her for inquiries.