With In the Kusina, Woldy Reyes Presents His Take on Classic Filipino Dishes

The Filipino-American chef Woldy Reyes is bringing his vegetable-forward take on Filipino food to a wider audience with the new cookbook In the Kusina.

On a March afternoon so balmy you can see spring right around the corner, I meet the Filipino-American chef Woldy Reyes in Grill 21, a cheerfully dive-y Filipino eatery in Manhattan’s East Village.

The leaves are still brown outside but in Grill 21, the flowers are in full bloom; at least the hand-painted ones on the walls, found in charmingly upbeat murals depicting tropical life. For lunch, Reyes and I order a feast of tocilog, sotanghon, fried lumpia and buko juice; appropriately festive perhaps, since we’re meeting to talk about In the Kusina: My Seasonal Filipino Cooking, his soon-to-be-released cookbook featuring his vegetable-forward take on Filipino (and Filipino-ish) food.

In less than a decade, the 38-year-old Reyes has become one of the leading names in New York’s Filipino food scene, a caterer of choice for brands like Alaïa and Celine, as well as the city’s burgeoning creative class, who’ve found in Reyes a kindred spirit. The evening before our lunch, for example, Reyes catered a dinner for Christine Sun Kim, the Berlin-based artist with a major exhibit currently running at the Whitney Museum, at the home of Scott Rothkopf, the museum’s director. 

It’s rarefied company for sure and his presence in those rooms; as a queer, deaf, Filipino-American chef, is in itself a remarkable act of representation. “The dessert that I made [for last night’s dinner] was my version of bibingka,” he says. “And obviously, the folks that were there may or may not have known Filipino food or even a Filipino chef. So to be in these spaces to perhaps create an awareness [about our cuisine]… I’m there to educate them. And when they do try [the food], they’re like, Oh, what is this? Oh my God!”

As buzz around his food has grown, the stylish, photogenic Reyes has become a subject of fascination too, a staple at fashion events around town routinely featured in publications like T: The New York Times Style Magazine and The Cut and social media campaigns for brands like J. Crew and Todd Snyder. That rise is especially impressive when you realize Reyes did not go to culinary school, forging a non-traditional, circuitous path to food powered by curiosity and gumption.

After initially moving to New York with dreams of working in magazines (“I watched Devil Wears Prada,” he says with a laugh), Reyes eventually found himself at the fashion brand 3.1 Philip Lim, where he worked on the sales team. It was while working at the brand that Reyes began to start honing his chops in the kitchen, hosting well-received dinners in his apartment that gradually emboldened him to imagine a career in food.

He started working part-time for a catering company, to understand the logistics of the operation, while simultaneously assisting a stylist on shoots. And soon, he was ready to bet on himself and take the risk. “When I opened my business, I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “I was just doing it, figuring it out. You learn as you go.”

In the Kusina, then, is a culmination of the journey so far. “It was basically a therapy session,” he says, about the book’s creation. “I had to really dive deeper to make this so that there’s an emotional connection to the recipes, because that’s how I want people to enjoy my [food too].”

Featuring more than 100 recipes of Reyes’s take on classic Filipino dishes, the book captures Reyes’ version of classic Filipino dishes; his queering of it, as he says. “It can be delicious, it can be flamboyant, it can be however I want to express myself,” he says.

The book is also, interestingly, especially for a Filipino cookbook, divided into the four seasons. “I’m subconsciously thinking about the health of the planet,” he says. “And if you cook seasonally, we’re thinking about sustainability… I live in New York, we do follow the seasons. I see what’s available in the market, and so that’s the most intentional, healthy way to cook.”

While putting In the Kusina together, Reyes confesses that he had anxieties around how the book will be received by Filipinos in the mainland. The Philippines, for example, obviously doesn’t have four seasons. Will those in the country find his book alienating?

“There’s always doubt there for me, because I’m a pleaser and I want to be conscious [of how others will feel],” he says. “But then I’m like, ‘This is your version, and once you put it out there, you’re going to have to accept the fact that you’re not going to please everyone.’”

A key collaborator in that sense was Reyes’s friend Lj Almendras, a Cebu-raised, New York-based chef who served as a food stylist for the book. Reyes says Almendras helped him see that “it’s okay that I’m sharing this vision of how I see the food that I grew up eating.”

For his part, Almendras, who is set to open the queer Filipino wine bar Beautiful Eyes in Manhattan later this year, tells us about the many ways Reyes has supported him. Last year, for example, when Almendras was hired by Silverlens Gallery and the artist Nicole Coson to cater a VIP dinner in their New York gallery, before Coson’s solo exhibit, he found crucial support in Reyes. It was Almendras’ first dinner of that scale and instead of seeing him as a competitor, as others might, Reyes offered himself to work under Almendras for the evening.

“Woldy was supposed to be there just to help me set up the dinner space but he decided to stay and made sure the table setting was beautiful and service was smooth,” Almendras tells Vogue. “That night reminded me how lucky I am to have a friend and colleague in Woldy. Strength in numbers is key in hospitality and luckily that’s something inherent in us Filipinos; that sense of kapwa or shared identity that translates to making sure our own shines and succeeds in what they do.”

That sense of kapwa is apparent in Reyes’s generation of New York Filipinos in food, which counts The Drew Barrymore Show’s Pilar Valdes and Mayumu: Filipino American Desserts Remixed author Abi Balingit. “To me, it’s like, there are a lot of us, and we enjoy it,” Reyes tells me. “We admire everybody. One thing that I don’t really like is this mindset of, there can only be one. I don’t believe that. There can be many.”

Looking at Grill 21’s flora-forward walls, I tell Reyes that I’m reminded of his book’s introduction, where he writes about his Lola Dominga’s “verdant, leafy, magical garden,” a memory from childhood that shaped the way he thinks about food.

“I was absolutely amazed at the way she’d be cooking something in the kitchen and then she’d go out to the garden, snip-snip something, and come back in and use it right then,” he writes. “Watching food go, literally, from ground to stove to plate left a powerful impression on me.” Prior to moving to America, his grandmother had worked in a family-owned restaurant in Manila. And in many ways, Reyes learned a lot of who he eventually became from her. “I just was close to her hip all the time, being in the kitchen with her.”

His Lola Dominga passed away in 2018. At that point, Reyes was already working in food but he says his grandmother spent her last few years in an assisted facility. “She would remember me but I don’t know if she was aware,” he says. “I hope she did know that I got into food. I think in some ways, probably it is in my blood.”