For someone with a multi-cultural upbringing, the Bistro Group’s corporate executive chef is not boxed in by it. Instead, as a prime mover of produce-driven dishes, he puts more emphasis on using the right ingredients and finding the best ways to cook them and bring out their flavors.
By ALEX Y. VERGARA
Photography by RXANDY CAPINPIN
What makes The Test Kitchen, Savage, Ember and Helm, four homegrown but totally different restaurants carrying Chef Josh Boutwood’s signature, quintessentially his? The British-Filipino chef, thanks to one of his regular diners, recently found a succinct but fairly accurate way to describe them.
“He told me how he loves to go to my restaurants,” the 36-year-old chef shares with PeopleAsia. “And in summing up how they all are, the diner put it so elegantly — they’re all from the same book but from different chapters.”
Savage, for instance, is a “primal” restaurant that eschews the use of gas and electric in favor of charcoal. Portions are big and their flavors, due largely to the way ingredients, especially those man-size steaks, are cooked, are quite robust. On the flip side is Ember, a “more sophisticated version” of Savage, which, apart from charcoal, relies on electric- and gas-powered stoves and grills to get the job done.
And it’s not meant simply for show. “The way you cook [a dish] has an immense effect on the flavor. Cooking in Savage also requires a lot of know-how and understanding on how to control fire,” Josh, the corporate executive chef of the Bistro Group, says.
Intimate affairs
All his restaurants, except Savage, are small, intimate affairs. Ember and Helm, for instance, have indoor seating for 30 and 24 diners, respectively. And Josh likes it that way.
“I don’t have a definite day or time of the week assigned to a particular restaurant,” he tells us. “But I do go during restaurant hours. Yesterday, for instance, I was at Ember where I had lunch with my family. I don’t want guests to feel like the experience is going to be better with or without me there.”
Savage, his biggest restaurant, which seats up to 50 people, is in BGC, while the smaller Ember is nestled at Greenbelt 3. His very first baby, The Test Kitchen, which opened sometime in 2012, has since moved from San Antonio Village in Makati to Rockwell, while Helm, after first making waves among foodies in BGC, is now on the third floor of the newly opened Ayala Triangle Gardens, right in the heart of Makati’s Central Business District.
And his signature is evident in each restaurant, from their individual ambience and interiors, all the way down to how their respective back-of-the-house and frontline staff conduct themselves and deal with guests. His philosophy when it comes to cooking also trickles down to each of these restaurants.
As one of the country’s prime movers of produce-driven food, Josh, instead of focusing on a specific cuisine or two, puts more emphasis on ingredients. The thrust has nothing to do with specific ingredients, per se, but on the importance placed on them, which trumps some of the most common influences many restaurants draw from.
“The way most restaurants are set up nowadays, they’re built around a particular cuisine, which could be, say, Italian, Chinese, and so on,” he explains.
Josh, who, as a child, grew up washing dishes in his British mother’s restaurants in the United Kingdom and Spain while spending his holidays in his dad’s native Boracay, finds nothing wrong with that. But once you anchor your restaurant on a particular cuisine, you effectively become boxed in.
Produce-driven
“By being produce-driven, you are not hampered by a particular cuisine or culture,” he says. “In my restaurants, we’re multicultural when it comes to food. For us, it’s about finding the right ingredients and the best way to cook them to bring out the maximum flavor.”
Josh though isn’t strictly into fusion cooking — the culinary-ism du jour in the early 2000s that has earned a negative connotation over the years. “But at the end of the day,” he qualifies, “who doesn’t do fusion nowadays? Almost everything is a mix-up.”
Instead, he describes his overarching style as “chaos cooking.” But you won’t find anything as extreme as, say, Chinese and Italian cuisine on one plate. Everything he serves must be palatable and, of course, edible.
“On top of that, my restaurants are designed not only to give sustenance to guests,” he says. “They’re designed to create memories — from the menu development to the food, down to the way we do our service. Everything is catered around guests with the objective of creating memories for them to remember for years.”
Josh isn’t kidding when he tells us that it’s typical for him to have 18-hour days, six days a week. But Mondays, he says, are sacred, as he spends them with his Swedish wife, Nilla, and their daughter, Malaya, 14, and son, Phoenix, who’s turning seven this July.
As part of the Bistro Group, he’s also on top of 137 company-operated restaurants in the Philippines grouped under such popular and iconic American chains as TGI Fridays, Italianni’s, Hard Rock Café, Denny’s, Olive Garden, Modern Shanghai and Bulgogi Brothers, among others.
Contrary to conventional thinking, many of these foreign chains’ menus aren’t set in stone. In the Bistro Group’s case, it was given 20-percent leeway to come up with locally influenced dishes that would appeal to the Philippine market. As corporate executive chef, Josh takes the lead in researching, costing, creating, testing, cooking and even marketing these new additional dishes. His work also involves controlling cost and labor, and making sure staff training is up to date.
“You know, areas a young chef isn’t interested in, but needs to learn. I wouldn’t have been able to do what I do today without the knowledge I gained working with Bistro,” he says.
To deal with such a gargantuan task means also learning how to master time management, as Josh juggles his time between the office and the kitchen, as well as between the restaurant chains and his four showcase babies. Thanks to remote work, he’s able to accomplish much these days with just his laptop and a stable Wi-Fi connection. But the bulk of his work still requires him to be physically present in the kitchen or in one of those many restaurants.
“I rarely think about how busy my day is going to be,” says Josh, who enjoys and thrives under pressure. “If I do, I’m going to be extremely overwhelmed. Instead, I wake up every day with the mentality that I’m going to achieve as much as I can. If I manage to do that, then great. But I’m not going to be upset if I don’t because there’s always a new day tomorrow.”
From West to East
This was far from how he and Nilla envisioned their lives back in 2010 when they decided to pack their bags and, together with the then very young Malaya, left Europe for the Philippines. In Boracay, Josh eventually put up his first-ever restaurant in the country, a standalone beachfront place called Alchemy.
Boracay happens to hold a special place in his heart. It is where his parents, now long separated, met. When he was growing up, he would often fly to the Philippines and spend his holidays in the island-paradise to soak up the sun and be with his dad, also a restaurateur. It’s also where he and the beach-loving Nilla, then on a holiday, first crossed paths.
Before they made that “massive” decision to relocate, as Josh puts it, he hardly knew his father’s country. He was always on vacation mode while in the Philippines, which hardly equated to living and experiencing life on the ground.
“I wanted to really experience what being a Filipino is all about,” he says. “My wife and I also love the beach, and I wanted my daughter to have the same upbringing as I did — living on the beach. So, we decided, let’s gamble.”
And it’s a gamble that eventually paid off. Less than two years after Josh put up Alchemy, the Bistro Group came knocking. Although it was a tempting offer, he had to carefully weigh his options, including spending some time in Manila to test the waters.
For someone who’s also drawn to a frenetic lifestyle, he discovered that he loved the Manila scene. By then, the lure of running Alchemy had somehow lost its luster due to Boracay’s unmitigated and sometimes haphazard development.
“I lost ambience points as we had [neighboring establishments] reggae music playing on one side, and house music on the other. All good things must come to an end. So, I decided it was time to close Alchemy and head to Manila,” he says.
And Josh grew as the Bistro Group did. From managing 36 restaurants in 2012, that number has nearly quadrupled today. And the priceless corporate experience Josh gained, he says, has made him a better businessman. As for his biracial background and East-meets-West upbringing, he credits them for making him a well-rounded chef.
“I grew up very confused because I didn’t really know where I’m from. Add to that, my parents separated when my brother and I were very young. But as a chef, I’m grateful for the opportunity of having been able to share and experience two cultures because it has made me who I am today,” he says, adding that he loves living in the Philippines and can’t imagine himself and his family living elsewhere.
In the end, he has become the total opposite of a purist, pursuing neither Filipino nor European cuisine. Instead, like many distinguished chefs before him, Chef Josh Boutwood is on a continuing quest to pursue great food.
Art Direction by DEXTER FRANCIS DE VERA
Styling by EDRICK PAZ
Grooming by KLENG TOTANES
Shot on location at CONRAD MANILA
