Filipino Food, Authenticity and Tradition: An Interview with Budgie Montoya

Palate writer Amanda David (AD) talks to Filipino chef Ferdinand ‘Budgie’ Montoya (BM) about his journey in hospitality, his passion for Filipino cuisine and the double-edged sword of authenticity and tradition.

 

AD: Budgie, you’re renowned for championing Filipino cuisine in the UK and opened several restaurants before stepping back recently due to health issues. How are you adjusting to the change?

BM: I’ve always seen cooking as a form of expression. I don’t cook as much now as I used to due to my health, but the creativity doesn’t stop just because my heart did. Now I’m exploring writing as a creative outlet. I feel there is a similarity in terms of being able to express myself authentically, in my own way. I don’t consider myself a writer, but then I seldom consider myself a chef; I think of myself as a cook, I’m always learning. I don’t have a restaurant at the moment so I find it even more difficult to call myself a chef.

 

AD: Do you see having a restaurant as a requirement?

BM: I think they go hand in hand. I appreciate it’s a very old school way of thinking; it’s been surprising how what a chef looks like has changed over the past few years. There are chefs now who have never worked a day in a commercial kitchen in their lives. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know.

 

AD: When did you become interested in cooking?

BM: I’ve always been self-sufficient, but I started to cook more demanding dishes at home when I was in my mid-20s. I worked in Telco and IT and that was my way of switching off. There is always a level of presence required when you are cooking and that helped me a lot in dealing with stress. I have always enjoyed my food too, so that was a bonus.

If I’ve inspired just one Filipino chef to go back and start cooking and championing Filipino cuisine, then I’ve done what I set out to do

 

AD: You went around Europe on holiday with your wife in 2009 and ate at The Fat Duck, which was a kind of turning point for you, is that right?

BM: I always think of those ‘sliding door’ moments in life, and 2009 was one of those. We had saved money for a deposit on a house but the market was so competitive that we decided to spend the money on a really nice holiday instead. We went on a really cool adventure across Europe, curated around food; we’d originally planned to go to El Bulli, which was the best restaurant in the world at the time, and The Fat Duck was second. El Bulli had a really weird booking system, like a raffle. I got an email saying ‘Congratulations, you have been selected’ and I thought that was it; but then it said you had to reply with reasons why you should be chosen to eat there, and they would let you know if you had been accepted. I thought that was a step too far, so I just ignored the email.

 

AD: That is crazy, I didn’t realise that.

BM: I still think [Ferran Adrià] is a genius and what they did there was amazing, but that whole procedure was a joke. So then I went to book at The Fat Duck – I actually got the dates wrong, so I had to change my flights and stay in London an extra day so I didn’t miss the booking, but that’s another story.

 

AD: I love that you did that! Good priorities.

BM: The Fat Duck was essentially at its peak. It was revolutionary; the book was already out, but I hadn’t seen or read it yet. I remember from the moment I made the booking to the moment I walked out, there wasn’t a single point of contact with that restaurant where I didn’t feel welcome and valued – unlike El Bulli where I was expected to prove myself worthy. It was the little things: they knew who we were when we walked in, knew we were on holiday, all the little personal touches. It was the first time I’d really experienced that level of hospitality and I remember walking out and saying to my wife, that’s what I want to do in life. Not necessarily cooking at that point, or any specific role, just making people as happy as I felt at that moment.

 

AD: Was that more to do with the quality of the food, or the level of customer service?

BM: Both; it was the true meaning of the term ‘hospitality’. I mean, the food was phenomenal but it wasn’t what made such an impression on me, it was everything else. They were so professional; you could see the love and care and attention that went into everything. I grew up in an immigrant family where hospitality was not seen as a respectable career path, so I’d never really thought about it as an option; having that experience at The Fat Duck changed my perceptions. The idea of being able to create memories for people like The Fat Duck did for me, that feeling of being completely and utterly happy, was what I wanted.

When I got back from holiday I got really serious about cooking: buying books, learning methods and techniques, trying to recreate really difficult dishes. It set me on a new path. In 2012 I moved to the UK. My wife and I were nearing the cut-off age for getting a working holiday visa and I was thinking of changing careers anyway, so we decided to move to London for two years.

 

AD: Did you have any experience in hospitality at this point?

BM: I did an introductory culinary course at a local college; it helped a bit but nothing can prepare you for the realities of a commercial kitchen.

My first job here was larder chef at Dean Street Townhouse, then I moved to Story. I’d eaten there, thought it was amazing and tweeted something about how good it was. I finished by saying something like ‘I hope I get to learn to cook food like this’ and they responded to my tweet by inviting me to come in for a trial. So I went in; it was very intense – I won’t go into details – but I loved every second of it. For me, it was the next level in terms of my cookery. I’d always seen Michelin as the pinnacle of cooking; at the time they’d only just opened and didn’t have any stars, but you could tell there was the drive and the push to get there.

 

AD: What was your role there?

BM: I was offered a job as a demi-chef de partie, so pretty low. At this point I’d already been a CDP at Dean Street Townhouse so I essentially took a financial and positional step back and became immersed in the beautiful, crazy hot mess of fine dining. It was rough, brutal and competitive, and that brought out the absolute worst but also the absolute best in you; it was amazing.

 

AD: Forged in fire.

BM: It really was. Some people can get through it and some people can’t.

 

AD: Do you think you could have learned and achieved what you have without that kind of experience?

BM: Perhaps, but not as quickly. It’s impossible to know; they say diamonds are made under pressure and they are rare because of that.

 

AD: If you could go back in time, would you do it again?

BM: I would, in a heartbeat. I miss it so much. It made me who I am.

 

AD: When did you start cooking Filipino food?

BM: At that point I’d been working in Soho House for a while and was completely burnt out, and I saw an ad for a job in a place called Brooksby Walk. It was a bar with a kitchen, in an old public toilet in Clapton, very cool. So I got the job. At the beginning it was just me and a KP, but later we were able to bring someone else on as it got busier. I really enjoyed it. It was very bar-led; the owner was like, I don’t care what food you do, you can do whatever you want, just make it taste good.

At the time I was feeling homesick and I’d looked for Filipino restaurants but it was very difficult; the few that were there were quite dated and mostly not great. So then I started trying to learn about Filipino cuisine, asking my mum for some recipes and experimenting at home.

 

AD: Had you started your supper club at this point?

BM: I’d just started Sarap with my flatmate around the same time. I was playing around with my version of Filipino cuisine and Southeast Asian flavours; I would do a fried chicken with banana ketchup and things like that. I’d always worked in European kitchens, so it was about applying those techniques to the familiar flavours that I’d grown up with.

 

AD: So you weren’t cooking strictly traditional Filipino dishes?

BM: No, Sarap has never been traditional, although it was very much based on memory and that feeling of being home. It was born of being homesick and missing that comfort of community, which is what Filipino food is all about; it’s intertwined in our identity as a people.

 

AD: How did that become a full-time thing?

BM: I’d got a head chef role at Foley’s in Fitzrovia, which I took thinking that I would be able to do more Southeast Asian and Filipino cuisine but it didn’t really work out the way I’d hoped. In the end I took a leap of faith; I quit that job and I decided to pursue Sarap full-time as a residency and pop-up concept.

 

AD: Was that at The Sun and 13 Cantons? That’s such a finishing school of new talent.

BM: No, my first residency was at a pub in Highgate called The Duke’s Head, that was when I started doing barbecue: basically, barbecue, salad and flatbread. It went well until the Filipinos found out I didn’t serve rice and then things went downhill very quickly. I was pretty dramatically humbled and had to immediately change my concept!

From there I went to Dalston and did a residency there. It was quite funny because Jonathan Nunn stumbled on that pop-up, and then wrote something on Eater about places to go at the weekend and mentioned me. I remember that weekend getting absolutely rammed. And then a couple of the Super Eight guys read that and they lived nearby, and they came to try it and they loved it. So all these Super Eight people and their chefs started coming.

There was a laundromat next door, and I remember Tomos Parry was dropping off his laundry and he’d just got a star at Brat. The place was really dead and I was just standing outside thinking about my life decisions as he walked past, and I congratulated him on his star. So then he came in and ate as he was waiting for his laundry, and he loved it; it kind of snowballed from there, I ended up with a bit of a cult following and that led to The Sun and 13 Cantons.

 

AD: I love stories like this! Hospitality can be such a small world. And am I right in thinking that you won the Brixton Kitchen competition, like Joké Bakare?

BM: Yeah, we were in the same year. There are two categories, professional and amateur; I won the professional one and Joké won the amateur one. She beat Ruben from Ruben’s Reubens and I went up against the Fallow boys at the end.

 

AD: And you beat them?

BM: I think that had more to do with the location and concept fitting better, but yeah. Can you imagine Fallow at Brixton Market?

 

AD: I remember going to Chishuru when it first opened and being directed halfway through the market to the loos.

BM: It was the worst. People loved our food, but we would get terrible reviews because that toilet experience was so bad. So I won and got the site for six months; unfortunately it was January 2020 when we opened. I tried to double down and turn it into a takeaway concept but we never got the volume to make it work; meanwhile I’d been offered Heddon Street and we were so busy there that we were sleeping in the restaurant, so I closed Brixton and moved the staff to Heddon Street. It was only supposed to be a six month thing but we ended up being there for 18 months.

 

AD: And then you were on Great British Menu. What was that like, both personally and professionally?

BM: It was an amazing experience; so many emotions. Imposter syndrome, for sure: do I belong here? I don’t even have a real restaurant, it’s just a pop-up. I don’t have any accolades or stars to my name, and here I am in this show that I watch on TV, with these prestigious chefs. So it was a lot of pressure. And at that point the business wasn’t doing well; we were struggling, so there were a lot of pressures outside too.

 

AD: It looks terrifying, that level of scrutiny.

BM: You put pressure on yourself, to perform. It’s really difficult, but it’s an experience that I’m so grateful for. I was able to raise people’s awareness of Filipino cuisine on a scale that I would never have dreamed of. Sadly, by the time the show had aired we were winding down at Heddon Street. But it opened up a lot of opportunities for me from a branding perspective, which then allowed me to then put Filipino food in places where I never would’ve imagined, such as doing kitchen takeovers through contract caterers such as Genuine Dining, for clients like Spotify.

But the fact that I got to do Filipino cuisine was also difficult because I then had to tie it to the brief, and tie it to my region which was London. Making that fit with the Philippines was challenging. The pressure got to me in certain instances and there were some schoolboy errors. I think if I had my time again, who knows?

 

AD: Would you go back?

 BM: Oh yeah, I would. For sure.

 

AD: I’d love to see that. Let’s put that out there and see if they bite!

BM: The experience was very daunting but there’s a very strong feeling of unfinished business. There were things that I did that I know, given a different head space, would never have happened and I look on that as a lost opportunity. But I’m still very proud of what I did.

 

AD: I’m pretty sure that was the first time I’d heard about Filipino food in London.

BM: Funnily enough I feel that within non-Filipino circles, I’m more well-known than I am within Filipino circles; because I don’t cook traditionally, I get dismissed. Also I didn’t grow up in London, so I don’t have the Filipino London or UK connections. So in that respect, I think it brought me a lot of British support.

Alpas is my way to break free from any preconceptions of me, and of Filipino cuisine. The only thing I need to do is make it delicious, and tell a story on a plate

 

AD: I think the first time I ate your food was your Filipino-British fine dining concept, Alpas, at The Sea The Sea in Hackney. Talk me through that.

BM: So, Alpas means ‘to break free’. If we’re talking about authenticity and tradition and all those things, Alpas is for me, the pinnacle of everything that I’ve learned, all my experiences both good and bad. I chose that name because I feel like I can be free and do what I want with Alpas. With Sarap and Apoy I was always very careful about what I put on the menu because I didn’t want to offend; I felt the weight of community on my shoulders. Alpas is my creative outlet. Is it Filipino food? Yes, because I’m Filipino and I’m cooking, I’m behind the stove. It’s about honouring tradition, but not replication.

 

AD: I once heard tradition described as peer pressure from dead people. How do you use tradition and is it something that frees or restricts you?

BM: I’ve always respected tradition, but I’ll never be bound by it. I’ll never restrict myself to tradition. I think it is very important, it’s something that needs to be upheld, but I don’t think it should be used as a measuring stick or a whip. It’s not a box to put me in. Tradition is absolutely the base I start from, but it’s not the ceiling. If you’ve got roots, you need to grow from them, right? You can’t have innovation without tradition, and you shouldn’t have to choose just one.

 

AD: And while we’re walking in this particular minefield, how about authenticity?

BM: What is authentic? That’s such a loaded question. Are we talking pre-colonial, are we talking colonial, are we talking post-colonial? Whose authenticity exactly?

 

AD: That’s such a key point.

BM: Whose authentic model are we talking here? Your mum’s? I’ve never met your mum, so I don’t know what that means. Alpas is my way to break free from any preconceptions of me, and of Filipino cuisine. The only thing I need to do is make it delicious, and tell a story on a plate. That’s it. But then I understand what it’s like to be away from home. I understand what it’s like when the only thing that can attach you to that piece of history and your land and your home is the cuisine. Filipino cuisine is so intrinsically attached to our identity; it grounds us and it keeps us Filipino. This is one of my favourite quotes by Carmen Guerrero Nakpil:

‘A Filipino may denationalise himself but not his stomach. He may travel over the seven seas, the five continents, the two hemispheres, and lose the savour of home, forget his identity and believe himself a citizen of the world. But he remains – gastronomically at least – always a Filipino.’

 

AD: Do you think that’s why a certain group within any diaspora will resist innovation – because it’s almost like you are saying the original isn’t good enough somehow, and it feels like an attack on something precious?

BM: Absolutely. I hate using the word ‘elevating’ when it comes to Filipino cuisine because it implies that it needs it; it doesn’t. It’s what feeds our nation, right? That’s good enough. It’s better than good enough, it’s fantastic. There will always be the traditionals who question why a dish should be changed at all, but their concept of Filipino cuisine isn’t some archetypal original; it evolved to what it is now from something else. That’s true of every cuisine in the modern world.

I’ll give you an example: we have a dish called Sinigang, it’s a sour soup. And depending on where you’re from, there are different souring agents. The Philippines is made up of over 7,600 islands that didn’t have the same supply chains that we’re used to here in the western world, so what was on one island wasn’t available on another island. So Knorr came up with what is essentially a dehydrated sinigang powder; you add water and your ingredients and you’ve got sinigang. Delicious. I love it, I grew up on it. Is that authentic? Because if you’re asking what a Filipino person would eat at home, then it’s probably more authentic than making it from scratch.

So I guess that’s my question around authenticity: who gets to define it? Whose authenticity is it, and what are their criteria? What’s more authentic, me cooking strictly to someone else’s recipe or me cooking with my heart and my lived experience and my memories? I don’t think there’s anyone of any authority that is able to, or should be able to, gatekeep the cuisine of an entire nation.

 

AD: It’s such a deeply personal connection.

BM: I understand the concept of food forming your identity. I remember a couple of years ago, chef Philli got a lot of hate for describing herself as an Asian specialist and her cooking style as ‘dirty food refined’. Some chefs were calling her out, other chefs were saying it’s a misunderstanding, and I remember seeing one high-profile white chef backing her up, saying it was all bullshit. And I remember sitting there thinking I respect you a lot, but you don’t know what it’s like to have your identity based on a cuisine that’s then erased through someone’s holiday or gap year interpretation of it. Anyone can cook what they want, I believe that, but do the work; do some research and show some respect. I don’t believe in gatekeeping a cuisine, but I do believe in defending it.

 

AD: I read that Michelin is going into the Philippines now. What are your thoughts on that?

BM: I’m torn between believing that it should never be the yardstick for our cuisine, and being pleased that it will give us a validation that, for better or worse, puts us on the world map.

We need to look at things critically and understand what benefits and conversations it will bring. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right? Like I said in my Substack about Michelin, I’m concerned about what’s going to get overlooked; are they looking at the carinderias and turo-turo stalls or just what fits with their fine dining brief? That said, will I be there when they start announcing the Michelin stars? Hell yeah. I’m 100% going to be there clapping and celebrating, because those people deserve to be celebrated.

I didn’t grow up on Filipino food. I grew up on very westernised cuisine because my mother wanted us to assimilate into Australian culture, to fit in. Filipino food to me is my connection back; it’s how I learned to be Filipino again at the age of 40. It’s so important to me, not because it’s what I grew up with but because it’s the bridge to my roots, to my heritage, to lost time. Filipino food allows me to be Filipino again. It’s the language that I understand.

 

AD: It must be difficult to be accused of inauthenticity when you feel so passionately about the cuisine. I’m guessing that it’s mostly from other Filipinos?

BM: Almost always Filipinos or, my favourite, people who say my wife is Filipino, or my partner is Filipino. It hurts the most when it comes from your own people, because it’s like, I’m trying. I don’t do this for commercial success, I do this for the personal connection. I do this because I love it, and you’re the very people that I want to champion and shout about, and you are the ones tearing me down. So yeah, it hurts.

 

AD: It’s often the case that appreciation comes with hindsight. What do you think your legacy will be?

BM: I’d like to think that I’ve played a part in the success of restaurants that are doing well now in terms of Filipino cuisine; opened some doors or smashed through some ceilings. Basically if I’ve inspired just one Filipino chef to go back and start cooking and championing Filipino cuisine, then I’ve done what I set out to do.

 

Photos kindly provided by Budgie Montoya. Cover photo by Nic Crilly-Hargrave. Great British Menu photo by BBC / Optomen Television Ltd.

August 2025