Chef Josh Boutwood Thinks About Food A Lot

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In 2008, Josh Boutwood invited his lady friend Nilla Ström to come visit him in Spain, where he was living at the time in a town called Garrucha. They had met a year earlier on the island of Boracay, where his father ran the famous Friday’s Beach resort. Boutwood asked Ström to book a ticket to either Malaga or Murcia, which was close to his hometown. But there was some sort of mix-up and Ström ended up buying a ticket to Madrid, about an eight-hour drive away.

So Boutwood decided to make the drive all the way to Spain’s capital to pick up Ström at the airport. He was behind the wheel of an MG two-seater convertible, whose trunk wouldn’t close properly because his younger brother had left the keys inside it one time and he had to have a locksmith pop it open. It didn’t help that Ström’s suitcase was enormous; it was too big to fit inside the trunk of a two-seater sports car.

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Boutwood had to use his belt to fasten the trunk together with the suitcase sticking partly outside it, only instead of a proper belt, he was wearing a shoelace around his pants so they wouldn’t fall off.

“This was me and my now partner’s first real date—me picking her up from the airport and me tying the trunk down with my shoelace,” Boutwood says. We’re sitting in the newest iteration of his restaurant The Test Kitchen in Rockwell, Makati. His eyes glaze over and his lips curl into a tiny smile while he’s telling this story. “We drive for eight hours. Thankfully, the suitcase doesn’t fly off and we get home eventually.”

There’s a lot to unpack from this funny little episode in Boutwood’s life, not least of which is his commitment and willingness to go through a relatively punishing ordeal for a loved one. There’s also his unorthodox use of whatever’s handy to address a problem, and his generally relaxed demeanor in the face of what could have been a source of conflict and stress.

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All these things have served him well, as Boutwood is now undeniably a leading figure in Manila’s always exciting culinary scene. As the corporate chef of the Bistro Group, which is the closest the Philippines has to a restaurant conglomerate, he’s in charge of what goes on the menu at nearly 130 dining concepts and food outlets—from Friday’s and Italianni’s to Bulgogi Brothers and Buffalo Wild Wings. As if that’s not enough, he also runs his own restaurants—open-fire grill Savage, fancy chef’s table Helm, and tasting-menu-turned-multi-course fine-dining concept Test Kitchen. All have been well-received not just by the city’s pickiest eaters and dining cognoscenti, but even by what passes for food critics and regular folk who just want to eat at “someplace nice.”

All that is enough to make anybody’s head spin, but, at 33 years old, there’s a sense that Boutwood is only just getting started.

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PHOTO: E.S.L. CHEN

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A Fil-Brit in Spain

Because Boutwood’s mother, a British national whom he grew up with, was a restaurateur, the immediate assumption is that his foray and eventual specialization in the culinary arts is a foregone conclusion. But it didn’t quite work out that way. True, his earliest memories of food involved sitting on the window sill of the family tapas bar in Garrucha, Spain and watching mom running around serving customers. And yes, the young Boutwood eventually started helping out by cleaning the bar or sweeping the floor or washing apples. But the idea of cutting up ingredients and whipping stuff up over an open flame didn’t quite stick, at least, not during the early years.

“When I graduated from high school at 15 years old, I had no idea what I was going to do,” he says. “I was out partying, drinking, smoking. There was just not really any desire for me to actually become an adult and settle down and do something.”

There was a brief flirtation with a career as an architect, but that didn’t last long.

“I started to study technical drawing, which was kind of the first step if you wanted to become an architect, but that didn't give me the excitement that I thought it was going to give me. I had this imaginary thought that I was going to be doing something more interesting than just tossing out angles and learning about circumferences and calculations and all that.”

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Suit by Van Laack

It was his mother who threw out that first suggestion for Boutwood to go to culinary school.

“So I thought, okay, I'll give that a try,” he says.

At this point, one would assume that he followed through with that idea, discovered that he was quite good at putting ingredients together, tossing them into a pan over a stove, and that would eventually lead him to his current lofty perch as one of Manila’s most exciting chefs.

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Not quite.

He enrolled at a small cooking school on top of a mountain called Insitituto de Culinario de Mojacar, but it only took about two months before Boutwood discovered he didn’t quite like learning about culinary theory in a classroom as much as actual cooking time in a kitchen. He literally walked away from the school one day all the way back home and never looked back.

Of course, he got a dressing down from his mother after that.

“She tells me, ‘Look, you gotta figure something out.’ To which I had no perfect response for, which probably upset her even more, because I was a young adult with no direction whatsoever.”

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A couple of months in a culinary school

Boutwood’s mother’s solution was to send her son out to try for a place at the prestigious Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons in Oxford, England. The then-15-year-old flew to the school run by the famous Raymond Blanc for a culinary “audition,” which he aced. He came back for another trade test a few weeks later.

He remembers what he made that second time. “It was chanterelle mushrooms, and I put some cream, white wine, slightly gratinated, and I think I put some courgettes (zucchini), lightly steamed. I was super proud of that dish, and the head chef was like, ‘Yeah, I like this. This is good. You're invited for an apprenticeship.’”

School rules meant he had to wait until he was 16 before he officially joined Le Manoir. In the meantime, he practiced cooking at his mother’s restaurant. When the time came, he moved to Oxfordshire, about an hour away from his mother’s family’s hometown of Bedforshire. He stayed at a lodger’s house where other chefs in the restaurant lived.

“It was such a culture shock because it was a French brigade-style kitchen,” he says. “It's very much like the army where you have a hierarchy and I was the bottom of the bottom.

“And I didn't enjoy it,” he adds. “I hated it. I was homesick. It was cold, I’ve never lived really in the U.K., so I wasn’t used to it. No family around you.” He sighs.

After about four months at Le Manoir, Boutwood quit again and went back home to Spain.

An unexpected turnaround

While the young Boutwood kicked around and basically did nothing in Garrucha, he was dangerously close to a life of being a professional bum. He helped out a bit at his mother’s restaurant but he admits that he just couldn’t muster the motivation to make something of himself. He blames the environment.

“Doing nothing,” he answers when I ask if he considered doing anything else besides cooking. “That's what Spain did to me and my siblings. You live in a very rural area, and there is zero desire to progress. You just live day to day, have as much fun as you can at night. And repeat. It's a sad, sad upbringing.”

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Blazer and pants by BOSS

It was during a vacation at his father’s resort in Boracay—that fateful trip when he met Ström—that things started kicking into high gear in Boutwood’s life. First, a suggestion from Ström had Boutwood packing his bags and moving to Sweden to look for opportunities. It was 2008 and the worldwide recession made an already tough environment even tougher. He sent out his resume everywhere and managed to wrangle an opportunity to get behind the kitchen of Noma in neighboring Denmark, which at the time was widely regarded as one of the best restaurants in the world. Boutwood knew he wasn’t quite ready to fill the position of sous chef, which was what Noma was looking for, but his time there exposed him to inventive new ways of preparing and serving food.

Eventually, he did find steady work, this time at an actual, honest-to-goodness castle. Sweden’s Svaneholm Slott or Swan Lake Castle was looking for a head chef, and Boutwood fit the bill.

“I enjoyed my time there because we were such a small team,” he says. “We were cooking for banquets for up to 2,000 people. It was interesting. I was receiving a salary, which I had never really received before. And for the first time, I felt independent.”

Besides finally achieving a semblance of normalcy, one other thing that happened around this time was the birth of Boutwood and Ström’s first child, a daughter whom they named Malaya. Things were beginning to stabilize in the young chef’s life.

Which was why it was time for another big gamble.

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Back to his roots

By the end of 2010, after two brutally freezing winters in Sweden, the couple decided that it wasn’t the kind of life that they wanted. Boutwood says it was Ström, yet again, who brought up the idea that would eventually change their young lives.

“We had both visited Boracay,” he says. “My dad’s from there. So I said, ‘Okay, let me let me see if I can get hold of my brother to see if he knows of any restaurants that are for rent.’ He found something for me because he was based there.”

Within a week the family had booked a one-way ticket to the island and Boutwood had found a space that he could rent for P25,000 (he had no clue if that was a good price, but he thought he could make it work). Soon he was opening the doors to his very first venture in the Philippines, which he called Alchemy.

The beach life suited the young family well. Boutwood was all of 22 years old and was applying all of the things he’s learned so far to this new fine dining restaurant on the island—the flavors of Spanish cuisine, the precision of French cooking, the innovations of the Nordic kitchens he’s worked at. He offered dishes a la carte during the week and tasting menus on the weekends. He hired and trained a bunch of people, none of whom had any culinary or hotel and restaurant management degrees or backgrounds. He made things work.

Until Boracay started to change and became a serious party island. In 2011, the phenomenon called Laboracay was a thing, and bars on either side of Alchemy began blaring pulsing, deafening music at sundown. The restaurant was losing customers and both Boutwood and Ström knew that it was only a matter of time before things went so far south that it would be impossible to recover.

And that was when Boutwood got the phone call that would, again, upend his life.

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“It's amazing how the universe has always worked in my favor,” he says to preface the story of the phone call from someone who turned out to be a representative of The Bistro Group. Having not grown up in the Philippines, Boutwood had no idea what the group was, what they did, and even what they wanted with him. But he agreed to a meeting in Manila that would eventually lead to a job offer. It was initially for a six-month consultancy position. Almost eight years later and Boutwood is still with the group, which he says he is more than happy to be associated with.

“It was a little bit rocky [at first] because corporate cooking is very different from fine dining,” he says. It was a tedious process to get accustomed to. And I was thinking that this wasn't really what I want to do.

“But the more I did it the more I fell in love with it,” Boutwood adds. “It was a whole different mentality. It was more of a business-minded mentality, more corporate than it is creative. Everything has to be cost-controlled. And I had some great mentors back then, who still work with me today, who showed me the ropes of how they did it in the company.”

What was once a group that had less than 40 restaurants when he joined it in 2012 now has nearly 130, and it’s still growing. Boutwood says they intend to open up to 30 more within the year, and in a city and industry that are both incredibly picky and volatile, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

“I don't want to say that when you go to a Bistro Group restaurant that the restaurants have changed dramatically because there are classic dishes on our menu that have been there nearly 25 years, for example, in the Friday's menu,” he says. “But then there's always something there that's new. The team has gotten bigger and I'm very proud of them because I wouldn't be able to do what I do today with my own restaurants if it wasn’t for them.”

It’s no small matter, too, that the company that has played a not insignificant role in the life of Boutwood would continue to support him when he started getting that itch again to do something different.

PHOTO: E.S.L. CHEN

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His own restaurants

In 2016, Boutwood started feeling early-onset burnout. The Bistro Group had just brought in the popular American-style diner Denny’s, which operated 24 hours, and the chef had taken it upon himself to work the graveyard shift during its opening weeks. Coming to work at 8 p.m. and then going home the next day at 7 a.m. would take a toll on anybody, but Boutwood still had to report for work at the Bistro office after only a couple hours of sleep. Things weren’t much better in his personal life. He and Ström had had another child, a son whom they named Phoenix, but she had flown back to Sweden with both kids around this time.

“We were having a little bit of a rocky time with our relationship,” Boutwood says. “That's why I did the graveyard [shift], because my children weren’t here. I got so tired [then]. I'm like, ‘I can't do this anymore. I'm doing food that is acceptable to millions, but I came from a fine dining background. And I haven't been doing fine dining in the last four years.”

He talked about his issues with a VP at the company, and about a week later, the Bistro Group president himself came up with a solution: what about opening a restaurant together?

The result was the original The Test Kitchen, which he opened at the actual Bistro Group test kitchen in Makati. Besides the opportunity to finally flex his creative muscles—on cuisine he couldn’t exactly get to do on the menus of any of the Bistro Group concepts and brands—he had turned an otherwise non-revenue space into an exciting new restaurant that was bringing people in and was actually making money, despite having only 20 seats.

“Of course that wasn’t our formula in Bistro, which was more about quantity and turnover,” he says. “I think it opened their eyes a little bit.”

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The two other restaurants came together one after the other soon enough. What was initially an available space in Poblacion was the original location for Savage, but permit issues delayed the project until it was shelved altogether. But the Bistro Group bosses offered Boutwood another location in Bonifacio Global City, and it was here where the chef decided to realize his idea of a pre-industrial open-fire concept.

“Savage took off like a rocket,” he says. “I think that’s what the city wanted, something that was different. [It] was a complete different animal that I loved from the get-go because it's food that I enjoy. Grilled. For us to even do it on wood fire, which nobody else in the city was doing, was even better.”

Four months later, it was Helm’s turn to open. It had been a concept Boutwood had been kicking around in his head for about seven years, and an unutilized space downstairs from Savage proved to be the ideal location to finally make it happen.

The new home of The Test Kitchen—at One Rockwell in Makati—was the result of a fortuitous walk with his late pooch one morning. A restaurant that was just open the previous evening suddenly had boards up, signaling its closure. A phone call to the Rockwell leasing office confirmed it, and Boutwood had quickly made a pitch, asking them for dibs on the space. He decided on resurrecting The Test Kitchen, with a decidedly fresh twist.

“It’s now a la carte, and not a tasting menu anymore,” the chef says. “That's the major difference. I never wanted to replicate any of my existing restaurants in two different locations because they may lose heart and soul. But Rockwell has a very persuasive group of people, and they really wanted it here. So I did it.”

Despite the move to a more upscale community, Boutwood says he has kept the heart and soul of the restaurant, which means a focus on cured meats, a planned focus on cheeses, and a menu that depends on the freshest, most appetizing ingredients available in the market.

Love for the craft

When the Esquire team manages to pin him down for a few hours to indulge us in a photoshoot and chat, Boutwood is like a performer in a sketch comedy act—he says yes to everything and gamely poses with knives pointed at his face, plates surrounding him on the floor, and spoons attached to his cheeks. It’s a personality that matches how he says he is in the kitchen—calm, with occasional bursts of energy, and an overall disposition of loving where he is and what he’s doing.

“I can't not be in the kitchen,” he says. “I think that's probably one of my worst traits. I just can't switch off.” He reveals a couple of instances when his partner Ström woke him up and told him he had said things out loud in his sleep.

“She said I was saying, ‘Is that going to table 14?’” he says with a chuckle. “I must have been dreaming about something. Another time it was like, ‘The lasagna’s burning in the oven.’ Which is weird because I don’t even have lasagna on my menu, but I’m dreaming about lasagna. So even when I'm sleeping, I'm thinking about food, I’m thinking about restaurants.”

PHOTO: E.S.L. CHEN

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Clearly Boutwood has grown to love his profession and the industry he had initially resisted joining. And it’s a fondness that persists, even if he admits fixating on the occasional and inescapable negative reviews from actual and “keyboard” critics.

“Everyone’s a critic, and you can just go on your phone and do a Google review or a Facebook post,” he says, exasperation showing. “I can't say that I don't get upset sometimes. It doesn't do good for your self-esteem.

“I'm not saying I welcome bad reviews, but some reviews are worthy of reading because they give you insights which you may have overlooked. Constructive criticism. Unfortunately…” he trails off.

“For example,” he continues. “At Helm, we launched the new menu. I was busy that night and I didn't attend the service. And the review that I received afterwards, was that, from what I could gather, they were upset because I wasn't there. So they targeted everything. The menu is a chronological timeline of cultural influence on Filipino cuisine. But it’s not a history lesson. In the particular bad review, they said, ‘We already know the history of the Philippines. Why do we want to eat something like this?’ I didn’t respond, but my response would have been we are not giving you historical food. We're giving you our interpretation of a timeline and interpreting it in a way that involves food.

“And it's put me in a very sensitive situation if people want to go to my restaurant and expect me to be there.”

Boutwood just described one of the issues associated with celebrity chefs, something that, given his high profile and near-universal recognition by Metro Manila’s VIPs and food connoisseurs, he certainly falls under, despite his assertions to the contrary.

“This was never the plan,” the 33-year-old chef says. “The plan was never to be well known. The plan was never to be connected with a particular cuisine or restaurant.”

He pauses a bit and says hello to his partner Ström, who just then waves at him through the Test Kitchen’s glass doors with their four-year-old son Phoenix.

“The original plan when I was meeting the Bistro Group was to cook something that I wanted to cook. And I think that mentality still stays with me. No matter how many restaurants I opened. I still just want to cook food that I enjoy cooking, and I enjoy eating.

“But what's come with it?” he adds. “It's not a curse. Neither is it a blessing. Yes, more people get to know my name. But at the end of the day, I'm just still the same person, enjoying what I'm doing and just having the luck of what I think many would wish for.”

In this story: Produced by Paolo Chua and Roland Mae Tanglao • Photographs by ESL Chen • Styling by Paolo Chua • Interview by PJ Cana • Grooming by Joan Teotico • Hair by MJ Agaton • Shot on location at The Test Kitchen

Josh Boutwood: 'Even When I'm Sleeping, I'm Thinking About Food'

A Fil-Brit in Spain

A couple of months in a culinary school

An unexpected turnaround

Back to his roots

His own restaurants

Love for the craft