Rethinking Filipino food with Erwan Heussaff
There was something very honest about my conversation with Erwan Heussaff. Beyond the strong platform, the videos, the reach, and the visibility, I found someone still very much in discovery.
Before Heussaff became one of the most recognizable voices in Filipino food, his beginnings were far from the usual. He started cooking as a young boy of eight, and because he had the privilege to travel early on, food became part of how he understood the world.
After university, life took him to Russia, where he worked in large-scale catering operations for oil rigs and mining camps, producing hundreds of meals a day. But it was in his small apartment kitchen that another part of him began to emerge. Homesick, Heussaff cooked all sorts of dishes—many of which were Filipino—like adobo, afritada, nilaga, bulalo, and pinakbet. Food he missed. He improvised. He made do.
Then he started sharing those dishes online.
Building a path back to the Philippines
What began simply as recipes, reflections, and parts of his health journey captured on videos, evolved into something much bigger. Before people knew his name, Heussaff was a one-man team. He was writing, cooking, shooting, editing, and even knocking on doors himself, pitching to brands.
What struck me most was that while he was building a career, he was also, perhaps unknowingly, building a path back to the Philippines. As his work brought him across the country, he encountered dishes, ingredients, and food traditions he himself had never known.
That, to me, was one of the most beautiful parts of our conversation. He did not pretend to know everything.
In fact, he was very clear that the journey into Filipino food made him realize how much he did not know. When I asked him to finish the sentence, Filipino food is… his answer came quickly: diverse.
The nature of Filipino food
But Heussaff’s thoughts go beyond diversity. He spoke about it as something too broad, too layered, too alive to be boxed in by fixed labels. Filipino food lives in what is seasonal, local, grown nearby, pickled, grilled, steamed, and cooked simply because that is what the land and the day allow.
He made the point that a dish may carry one name in one place and mean something else in another. A preparation may look familiar yet belong to a different story depending on where you are. To him, that is not confusion. That is the nature of Filipino food.
Heussaff also does not care much for “elevating” it. Filipino food does not need saving. It does not need to be rescued by refinement. It needs to be understood, respected, and seen in context. A humble meal of boiled kamote and fish is as Filipino as a beautifully prepared feast. Fast food, fine food can all be Filipino.
What matters is honesty, story, and respect for where food comes from.
When it comes to migration, his view is clear. Filipino food has always moved. To deny that is to deny a great part of our culinary history. Our food is not static. It travels. It changes. That is what keeps it vibrant and alive.
What shaped his palate
Heussaff holds many unforgettable memories, like his first taste of palapa. He spoke of it almost as a revelation—one of those flavors that made him realize that what he thought was “missing” from Filipino food had in fact been there all along. He simply had not encountered it.
In Leyte, he remembered eating lechon with gaway, a local steamed tuber. Such a simple pairing, but one that opened his eyes. It reminded him that the way people eat in the regions often carries a wisdom all its own, one outsiders can easily miss.
A seafood memory that stood out was made in Basilan, with the Sama Bajau community, where women cooked food gathered from the mangroves: imbaw clams, sea urchin rice, and more. Beyond the meal itself, it was the community’s care for their environment; the relationship between people, food, and place—all of which he deems unforgettable.
There were lighter moments. Heussaff chuckles at the memory of eating the wrong mushroom in General Santos and suddenly feeling rooted to the earth, literally.
Still learning, listening, and becoming
What Heussaff eats when no one is watching could be as simple as boiled eggs and kamote. Not every meal has to be a celebration, he says. Sometimes food is simply sustenance.
After our long talk, what remains with me, more than admiration for all that Heussaff has seen and done is how he approaches it all… with humility. He does not speak as though he has arrived. He speaks as someone still on the road, still learning, still listening.
And this is perhaps why he matters.
Heussaff has found in Filipino food not just flavor, but a way into the country itself. And in doing so, he has helped us see our food not as limited or fixed, but as something rich, generous, complex, and still becoming.
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