The death of Luisa She Wong, founder of Luisa's Café in Baguio (a highland city in the northern Philippines known as a centre of arts and media), at age 88 in San Francisco has drawn renewed attention to one of the city's oldest surviving restaurants and its long role as an informal gathering place for journalists, writers, and artists. Founded in 1956 and still operating along Session Road with its original handmade noodles, Formica tables, and what is said to be the city's last working dumbwaiter, the café outlasted a succession of similar haunts — including Dainty Restaurant and Mandarin — that served as media headquarters across the decades. Under the management of her son Ronald Wong, the café's second floor has become home to a self-styled 'Vicious Circle' of regulars at Table 9, a loose gathering of media and creative figures modelled loosely on the famed Algonquin Round Table of 1920s New York.