Helm’s Josh Boutwood Feels the Pressure of Winning Two Michelin Stars

Don’t call chef Josh Boutwood the best chef in Manila. After he and his team at Helm, in Ayala Triangle Gardens, Makati, made history as the first and only Philippine restaurant to be awarded two stars at the inaugural Michelin Guide awarding last October 30, social media took over the discourse. Boutwood started seeing comments calling him the best chef in the country. “Some people were saying I was ‘the best chef in Manila’ and I feel that that title is very misleading,” Boutwood tells Rolling Stone Philippines. 

“The way Michelin assesses a restaurant, it’s about the food and the experience. There are some amazing chefs, and I don’t think there is any way to categorize the best chef in the Philippines,” he continues. “I am just very grateful that I was able to exceed Michelin’s expectations when they came for their inspections. But I would really like to skew that word a little bit because I don’t want our industry to see me as that. I feel like we need to grow together, and [I don’t want] to alienate myself with a title. I don’t want that. I want to be with everyone; to uplift the industry together and progress it as a whole.”

In this exclusive conversation, Boutwood talks about the anxiety and nightmares he had leading up to the Michelin ceremony, what being part of the team behind Helm means to him, and how their reservation system crashed right after getting two stars. 

Did you go to any parties or celebrate with your team after winning the two Michelin stars? 

Thursday night, I went straight back to the restaurant to be with my team. I skipped all the after parties, and I wanted to go and celebrate with my team. 

We still had service that night, and the team executed it without me. By the time my wife and I got back to the restaurant, all the guests had already left, so it was just my team, my managers, and we had a glass of champagne and a few beers, and just congratulated each other. This is a team effort. I can’t take all of the congratulations.

I remember during the event you quipped if they would start playing you out if you talked too much during your acceptance speech. Now that you’ve had a couple of days to reflect, is there anything you want to say that you weren’t able to?  

You know, it was extremely overwhelming. I think what people don’t actually know or saw was that I went up three times for the Michelin Selected for three of my restaurants (Ember, Juniper, and The Test Kitchen), right? They did the announcement of the first stars, and they got to Hapag, and it jumped straight to Inato. So in my head, I was thinking, did I miss Helm’s name getting called up during Michelin Selected? And I texted my wife, who was across the room on the other side, I said, “I don’t think we’ve got a star.” Maybe something went wrong with the service when the inspectors were there, I don’t know. So never once did it cross my mind that we would be getting two stars. 

And when the host, Issa Litton, said “But wait…” and started hyping up that two stars award, I was looking around the room, thinking, who the hell would have gotten this? Because Gallery by Chele got theirs, Asador Alfonso got theirs, Toyo [Eatery] got one and Inato got one. I was like, how many other chefs are here? And while I’m going through this mental process, everyone around me was tapping me and hitting me. And I thought, no, it cannot be. I was very dismissive of them. But then they announced Helm, and my whole world sank a little bit in a good way. I became extremely emotional at that moment. Luckily, I don’t show emotion very easily, but I was trembling, and I could not fathom the thought that we had gotten two stars in the first-ever Michelin Guide in the Philippines and the first Filipino chef to get two stars. It was all extremely daunting, and I was walking through that red carpet, and all I could think of was, “Where the hell is my wife? Where is she?”

I couldn’t believe what I was going up for. It didn’t register until I went out the back to go and get my jacket on. When I saw the jacket with two stars, that’s when I went, “Oh, fuck”. 

Obviously, I had zero speeches prepared, so I just had to wing it. And what I did say, I think, encompasses everything from the amount of support that I get from my personal family, from my team members, and the progress that we’ve made over the past few years. We’ve pushed boundaries as far as we possibly could to create experiences for the guests. We weren’t pushing boundaries for Michelin, it was pushing boundaries to make sure guests have an experience and for them to create a memory in the restaurant. I couldn’t do that without the amazing team and managers that I have behind me. But you know, it’s mad. It’s completely, unbelievably mad.

And to get two stars immediately…

It’s extremely rare, yes.

Reading about how these go, with the Michelin inspectors and all that, when it comes to two stars, they say that’s when the personality of the chef is really evident. How do you think your personality has shown over the years throughout Helm and especially in the dishes that you make?

I think it’s every chef’s ambition and desire to create food that if you were in a dark room and you did not know who was cooking, you’d be able to identify it by the flavor, the composition, and the texture of the dish. I’m not saying that I’ve achieved that but I think we are progressing in that direction where we’ve created a language with food that represents me and my personality. It’s not strict. It’s not overly elegant. It’s very personal how we approach our service, our style, and the way we do our dishes. Nothing is overly complicated. We don’t want guests to wonder how we did this and that. We want to be easily understandable so that anybody can enjoy it. But the ultimate goal here is that we’ve been able to balance our dishes in a way that is quite signature to Helm and to me as a person. 

You know, when guests come to Helm, they’re treated like family members, and as we remain professional, we’re able to also have a few jokes with them. We’re also able to have a bit of banter. Each guest has a different experience, because every personality is different. So we read the guests when they come in, and we kind of figure out how we’re going to make the experience around them. If you come in a suit and you’re in a business meeting, obviously we’re not going to be treating you like cousins or brothers or sisters. We’ll be treating you with a little bit more professionalism. But there’ll be instances where there’ll be a few jokes thrown in another table where they’re celebrating a first date or something. 

Was that a challenge at first because it’s one thing to show your personality in a dish, but it’s also another thing to open yourself up personally to guests you’ve never met before?

So, I’m kind of an introvert. I like to be on my own quite a lot, and I don’t get the opportunity to be on my own often. What happens for me is that at 5:55 p.m., right before doors open at Helm, I’m able to switch on this personality, this extroverted personality, and I forget about my introvertness and focus solely on making experiences for guests. 

But by the end of our second seating — this is around 11 p.m. or 12 midnight or sometimes even 1 in the morning — I am so socially drained that I get in my car, I don’t even put the radio on. I just drive in absolute silence. I get home, I sit on the sofa, I eat something, and I go to bed. I wake up the next day and I’m still socially drained. My wife can attest to that, because I don’t speak much in the morning. But then it all happens again at 5:55 p.m. when we open our doors.  It was a hard thing to learn, because it does not come naturally. People will see it as natural, because I’ve had a lot of practice with it, but yeah, it’s taken time. It’s taken years to get that confidence to speak to everybody.

I can imagine how overstimulating that must be, to heighten some aspects of yourself.

It is very overstimulating. You couldn’t have put it in a better way. Like, throughout service, there are times where I speak to my team and say, “Look, I’m going to go out and have a coffee because I just need to decompress for a moment.” You’re having probably 15 different styles of conversation with guests throughout one seating, and you have to remember exactly what style of service those ones are receiving. Because you don’t want to overstep the boundaries that have been set forth by their personalities. The moment you get a little bit confused and overstimulated, that’s when I’m like, “I’m going to go out for a coffee. I’ll be back in five minutes” and then I’m able to recap, go through the tables once more in my head. Get my paces correctly. And then I feel better. I’m saying that I go out for a coffee where, in actual fact, I go for a cigarette. But hey. [Laughs]

One last thing on the topic of personality. Helm is very much communicated as a fine dining restaurant, but you’ve also done a lot more, I guess, “whimsical menus,” for a lack of a better word. You’ve done one that’s just inspired by color, by Harry Potter, and Star Wars. What has attracted you to those kinds of courses, especially for a fine dining setting?

I love restaurants in the fine dining scene that create menus that are so technically perfect, that are balanced so well; they flow perfectly from course to course. But I also feel that a guest that comes to a restaurant like Helm is going there to either celebrate something or they’re looking for an amazing experience, and I want there to be a story to be told with the menu. I could do a menu without a particular theme, but I feel like having a theme connects the guests to the menu, to create this invisible connection. For Star Wars, I thought that was just for me and my son. No, it turned out it was for half of the city. It was so interesting to see guests that could relate to every single dish and automatically place themselves in a particular scene from those movies. 

The Harry Potter menu was even more so. We actually had to extend the time frame of the Harry Potter menu by another one and a half months than usual because the demand was too high.

In a way, that was also what set Helm apart.

I believe so. I think the fact that we change our themes three times a year gives the opportunity for guests to experience Helm every four months and they get something brand new while still maintaining that style, elegance, and experience of Helm. 

And constantly changing also lets you test your limits.

You know, when boredom starts to set in, that’s the time we need to change the theme because we need to challenge ourselves again and find new ways of working with ingredients, find new techniques. That way, we become energized again to bring up the level once more. So it’s constant pushing.

I forgot to ask this earlier, but can you take me back to the days prior to the ceremony? What was your mindset leading up to the Michelin ceremony?

So Wednesday morning, the day before Michelin, I woke up at 5 a.m. because of a nightmare. That nightmare was me at the Michelin ceremony with no awards. And you know, when you’re in the state of REM sleep, you jump out and you kind of wake up, but then suddenly go back into the dream. It felt like it was sucking you back in, and it was the same dream over and over again. 

I was in a loop and I woke up so upset and depressed. That day, I had lunch with chef Chele Gonzalez in Asador Alfonso with a Colombian chef visiting. I was in a bad place and it was really bothering me, that dream. I’m a person who kind of believes in those dreams and what you’ve manifested kind of comes up,you know? So, I sat there for lunch with Joey Suarez, who is in public relations, and he knows the restaurant business, right?  We were just talking and I asked him what he thought about the awards. I was actually trying to forget about the awarding, but in a room full of chefs and PR people, it’s very impossible. Anyway, he said to me, “I think there’s only six that will be awarded a star,” which sent my anxiety up even more. He had no knowledge of it, but that’s what he thought. So, all throughout lunch, I was in my head trying to go through which restaurants could it be. 

The day of the event, I take the morning off, and I spend it with my wife. She could see that I was extremely anxious and nervous. She’s trying to calm me down, saying, “Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.” I don’t think it was just the two days prior. It’s probably been months prior to the awarding or ceremony because, you know, it’s constantly on your mind. It’s something so monumental for our industry in the Philippines that it wasn’t easy to not think about it. I think today is the first day that I’m not stressed, where I’m like, “Huh, shit, we actually did it.” I’ve finally had a moment to process it this morning.

That’s good. Maybe it wasn’t just you feeling that and if there’s any silver lining to the anxiety, other chefs were feeling that as well.

Chele and I had had a conversation that day in Asador Alfonso and he was equally as anxious as I was. He had some words of wisdom that I think helped in a way, because I see Chele as an extremely prominent figure within our culinary industry here in the Philippines. He’s very level headed when it comes to these things. He has a lot more experience in Michelin restaurants and hearing those kinds of reassuring words, it was nice. I think that’s the beauty of our industry, in that we’re all a very tight knit group of chefs who all help each other out. We all had each other’s backs during that ceremony. 

I am so proud of everyone being able to achieve what they’ve achieved but also, it was quite sad that there were a lot of other restaurants within our industry that weren’t able to achieve what they deserved. But there’s another year coming, and I think this next year is going to be a turning point for our industry. Hopefully next year, there’ll be 200 restaurants included. The opportunities are endless for any chef out there.

Especially now that there’s a sense of knowing what to expect and the bar that they have to reach, which is, you know, you. [Laughs]

It’s a daunting thought. I do believe that there are other restaurants that definitely deserve two stars and having set the bar unexpectedly does create additional pressure for me. But yes, I hope that it ignites other restaurants that aren’t in the list and those that are ready to really push themselves and bring our industry to higher heights.

A while ago, you mentioned that you celebrated with your team after the Michelin ceremony. What have you learned from your team throughout the years at Helm? Was there anything that they allowed you to be or challenged you to be?

I like that I have my team so close to me, as if they were an annexed family of mine. They have been with me for years. Some of them have obviously been there from the start, and we’ve grown Helm together.  The beauty of what we do is that we challenge everything with each other. If I ask them to try something, they will come back to me and say, “I don’t really like this. How about we try it like that?” I think that is the most beautiful combination of a team that I could ask for, because we challenge everything together. If they just followed my lead and did exactly what I wanted to do every single time, there would be very little variation. There needs to be variation. There needs to be an influence of their personalities within the food so that they also feel pride serving it. I don’t want them to just be followers. I don’t want to be the lone wolf where the sheep just follows me. I want them to be stronger, better, more knowledgeable, more curious, and put them on a path where they can succeed in our industry.

Have you seen reservations suddenly blow up right after the ceremony?

Within two hours of [our two stars] getting announced, we were fully booked. We have not opened January’s reservations yet, which we will do later in the week. But our system crashed, so we will work on that first. We’ve noticed that people were able to overbook the restaurant. So, I have to go through the reservation system to figure that out and make it more streamlined without having too many mistakes. 

It’s funny, we’ve gotten people coming to the facade of Helm just to take photos, and it’s become almost like a tourist attraction in Makati. It’s fun, it’s great, but I do feel a little bit like an animal in a zoo when I’m looking through the window of the door and I see people outside staring in. [Laughs] But it’s such an honor to have been given this accolade. I do hope that I [make] those two stars proud and we continue progressing, that we retain them and enjoy the same time.