“Just Like It Tasted In My Head” – This Is Helm By Josh Boutwood

Josh Boutwood thinks about food all the time. “Even when I’m sleeping,” he’s admitted. At Helm, his two-MICHELIN-starred restaurant in Manila, that restless creativity takes shape as menus that change every four months – ripped up, rebuilt, radically different each time. 

It looks so inviting. Inside Helm by Josh Boutwood, the chef and his team drift around, saying goodbye to the last diners of the first sitting, posing for photographs – the recent uncharacteristically generous award of two MICHELIN stars for Helm, and Selected awards for his other restaurants, Ember, Juniper, and The Test Kitchen, at the inaugural MICHELIN Guide Philippines has turned him into a star – their minds already on the second seating of the evening (the third of the day if you include lunch service).

First you’re led outside, viewing the restaurant through the wide-screen glass of its mall home, with a menu of classic cocktails, teas, and waters – whatever you want to impatiently pass the time.

At Helm By Josh Boutwood Every Menu Feels Different 

The terrace fills (and a gathering of people refusing to detach from the air-con by the doors inside) with guests here to try Josh’s Monochromatic menu.

It’s a conceptual leap from the last one, Harry Potter. And the ones before that, that come around every four months, like Street Food and Star Wars. Monochromatic promises “a vivid journey through the spectrum of color, where each dish draws inspiration from a single hue, exploring depth, contrast, and emotion on the plate.”

“We like to make sure that every menu feels very different,” Josh explains. “We’re a small restaurant, and we want guests to be able to come three times a year and have a completely different experience.”

Rip It Up And Start Again

That requires ripping up the last one and starting again in an intense two or three week window before the next one launches. “If I start too early, it becomes a chore to get it done,” Josh admits.

“I’ll have everything written in my head, I’ll taste it in my head. And then about a week or two before we transition, Joe and I will start working – we close on Mondays so that’s the perfect day – testing the dishes out, locking the recipes in.”

They may retain one or two ingredients from the previous menu, but everything else changes. The style, the flavor combinations. The Monochromatic menu has a lot of Filipino and Asian influences, whereas the Harry Potter menu was very Japanese-Western.

The change helps keep the team engaged too, “because after three and a half months, we’re bored already.” The final week, everyone’s in the kitchen, “prepping and training at the same time for a very fast turnaround, but we’re on our toes at that point.”

He’s learned to love the rhythm, the spikes of adrenalin that mark the menu changes, “even addicted to it” he offers. “I’ve always said that we have to be a little bit mad to enjoy what we do, but I also think that we have to be addicted to it to enjoy it.” Cooking the same dish for 20 years would be emotionally draining in other ways, he reckons.

A Little Bit Lost

The Monochromatic menu relates dishes to the color spectrum, though not in any particular order. “You may get a little bit lost throughout the evening,” Josh warns. It’s the good kind of disorientation – like wandering a new city without a map.

Aside from the snacks, bunched together at the top, each course is written along the line of one hue – the deep red of ‘wagyu, beetroot, fermented root crops,’ the warm yellow-orange of ‘quail, chanterelle, hazelnuts’ – each listed in three ingredients like they’re primary colors of the dish.

Always Thinking About Food

“I’m Josh by the way,” he begins now we’re all inside, as if – with that now-signature moustache – it wasn’t immediately obvious. “All day and every day,” he smiles. He really means that. In the past, he’s admitted to “Always thinking about food, ingredients, and possibilities – whether abroad or stuck in Manila traffic.”

The gentle British humor comes from his mum, the dry wit of an English parent raising her half-Filipino son between restaurants in Spain and Boracay. Some of his bouncy banter probably comes from the tough English kitchens he started working in from age 16 too. His wry asides punctuate each course like a satisfying seasoning.

But this isn’t fussy fine dining anyway. There are two shared tables with cracks of lighting on the hoods above, inspired by kintsugi – the Japanese art of piecing ceramics back together with gold. Josh and the team weave down the one nearest to the kitchen, applying sauces, squeezing on oils, till he’s satisfied enough to slide the dish across the table.

He leaves them there, in the center of the counter where the plate is just within range. That means you have to reach across and welcome it into your life, pulling it towards you, admiring its poise and complexity as you do.

As Carefree And Celebratory As Helm By Josh Boutwood Itself

The snacks, all served with a bright, biscuity Champagne Voirin-Jumel, begin with a hamachi cone made of lightly roasted nori, lightly dressed with fresh wasabi, full of oceanic umami flavor.

The second takes the kutsinta, a Chinese-Filipino dessert, and turns it savory, with a combination of lobster and tiger prawn with its bisque brightened with a lime kosho (made with local limes fermented with chili and salt for 14 days). “Try to avoid biting down on it as we have zero partnerships with any dentist,” Josh interjects.

The chicharrón beef tendon is a delicate build-your-own taco, snapping off a piece of one of the plumes of chicharrón, and spooning on some beef tendon with crab flesh that’s silky with Béchamel sauce and enlivened with chive oil.

The last is a one-bite puff tart with a king oyster mushroom pâté and a glaze of the ubiquitous adobo. The tart sits alone, looking over the edge of the dish, swinging its legs like a kid on a swing, as carefree and celebratory as Helm by Josh Boutwood itself.

A Dish Like A Summer’s Day In Manila 

The menu continues, as promised, to jump around the color wheel. Purple for the tuna from southern Japan that takes a little pepperiness from daikon with a coconut-cabbage-citrus sauce that cuts through the richness; orange for the braised octopus folded with rendered pork fat, topped with a tomato emulsion made from locally-grown tomatoes simmered in dashi.

“And what we have here,” Josh announces for the third course, served with an earthy, apple-y Aligoté from Burgundy, “despite what the name says, because I haven’t had time to log on to change it, is rainbow trout from the brackish fjords of Norway and not salmon – we kind of go back and forth.”

He likens the cooking method to a summer day in Manila, “41 degrees Celsius, quite a low temperature for fish.” It’s served with an earthy cracker – to offset the silky, fatty fish – and a sauce of roasted capsicum and some coffee oil from local Arabica.

“The Freshest We Can Get”

Then Sebastian arrives. “If anyone wants to smell Sebastian you can, but please don’t eat it,” Josh delivers his line, deadpan.

Nine years ago, he’d started with five jars all with equal amounts of rye and water, and each one was given a name starting with ‘s.’ “Day one, I removed the one that’s least active. Day two, I removed the least active, and it was down to Starlight and Sebastian. Sebastian was stronger, so Sebastian survived,” he adds, finally breaking into a chuckle.

Here it becomes Helm’s signature sourdough. There’s a brioche, “a bit like a cheesy bread,” glazed with a syrup made from yesterday’s unused sourdough, and they’re served with caramelized butter, rendered pork fat with parsley, like “spreadable pork scratchings,” and the last one infused with Russian caviar together with a touch of acid. There’s an olive oil too, Olio Nuovo from the Badia a Coltibuono estate, that’s grassy and spicy, with a hint of bitterness, “the freshest we can get of the year.”

Full Of Filipino Touches

“Then angelic Patagonian toothfish arrives green, dill putting color in its cheeks. The quail comes two ways: dry-aged 14 days with quail jus, espuma for umami, fregola cooked with chanterelles and roasted hazelnuts. The second as a dry-aged leg breaded with rye and panko, served with mole – a homage to the Philippines’ long-time connection to Mexico’s Pacific coast – made from lemongrass, ginger, local chilies and tablea chocolate.

And there’s Miyagi wagyu beef – “not to be confused with Mr. Miyagi” – dry-aged seven days, seared, and served with braised leeks, bone marrow and wine jus. Yellow arrives as fresh mangoes embedded in aerated white chocolate and bagoong, a salty fermented shrimp paste.

The coffee is single-origin Tanzania, dark-roasted for Helm, tasting of chocolate and tobacco. And the petit fours include a green tea macaron, and a tikoy-style rice cake.

It’s a mesmerizing menu radically different from the last, full of Filipino touches and whimsical allusions to summer days in Manila. Just like, you imagine, it tasted in Josh Boutwood’s head.