For Just The Way My ____ Made It, Po & Pilar is asking chefs to leave their usual signatures behind. The restaurant’s new takeover series invites guests to build a menu around someone who shaped their appetite, memory, and, of course, way of seeing food.

Bruce Ricketts opens the series with a four-course dinner centered around some time-honored Cantonese favorites. At its core, his Just The Way I Made It For My Dad concept is about cooking the kind of meals he wishes he could make for his father now. “It’s my memories with my dad on different occasions, compiled into a four-course meal,” says Ricketts. “These are dishes we both love and that I wish I could prepare for him now that I know how to cook.”

That relationship gives the dinner its emotional vantage point. Before Ricketts became one of Manila’s defining modern Japanese chefs, he trained first as a martial artist and worked with his father as a hand-to-hand combat instructor for the United States Armed Forces. He later cooked in San Diego before returning to Manila at 21, eventually opening Sensei, La Chinesca, Mecha Uma, and Iai.

Family, in this context, is specific rather than sentimental. For Ricketts, it comes from a life where discipline, work, and inheritance appear to have met early. That may also explain why this dinner will not simply feel like Iai transplanted into another room. “Because this is more memory-based and instinct-driven, it will definitely be dishes I haven’t done at Iai,” he says. “These are ideas that are near and dear to my heart.”

That departure is exactly what Po & Pilar co-founder Jericson Co wanted from the series. “We’ve been part of the guest shift hamster wheel,” Co says. “We present tried-and-true drinks from The Curator, or the incoming guest does a tried-and-true set from their menu. While those are fun, I think what we have here is a little more intimate. We can tell a specific story. It’s a nice break and a challenge to riff on things we love.”

Co remembers meeting Ricketts at an industry event and recognizing a fellowship of sorts around culinary mischief, playful and difficult at times. “I remember the first time I met Bruce and immediately clocked that he’s our kind of crazy,” he says. “It was fun to see him play with ideas and with his food.”

Future editions will bring other guests into the Po & Pilar kitchen and behind its bar to explore their own formative relationships through food and drink. “I want guests to walk away dreaming of what they’d cook and riff on for the people most valuable to them,” notes Co.

A Memory in Four Courses

The menu opens with Wagyu Fried Rice, a comfort course with a touch of ceremony. It has the familiar pull of rice, fat, and heat, but the grains stay distinct, catching bits of beef and browned edges beneath a generous blanket of molten, gratinated cheese. Nostalgic in the best sense, the kind of dish that understands how to make neighborhood fried rice feel newly indulgent.

The Cantonese-style French Pigeon and Iberico Rib Asado give the menu its center of gravity. This pigeon dish noticeably is derived from the pleasures of Cantonese roast duck, with burnished skin and cleanly carved pieces arranged inside a ring of cucumber. That crisp, cool border does real work, cutting through the bird’s richness with some crunch and a faint green bitterness. The flavor moves through soy, malt, spice, and roasted depth, with the pigeon bringing something darker and more mineral compared to duck. Hard not to see the appeal.

The Iberico Rib Asado is the menu’s decadent proposition, a run of lacquered pork, rendered fat, and caramelized edges. Basil and cilantro cut through with a spiced-up, peppery lift, keeping the sweetness from sitting too heavily on the palate. It feels like asado after a few clever interventions, still familiar at heart, just anchored by this smoky quality, deepened by the glaze, then lifted by the brightness of the herbs.

Punctuating the menu is a reimagined Mango Sago, with its lush, tropical sweetness. The cream and sago soften it into a gentler rhythm. Crisp cinnamon shards top off the dish, which, interestingly, keep it from becoming a little too predictable, adding crackle and contrast to all that fruit and silk.

With Ricketts, Just The Way My ____ Made It begins with a father, and with an idea that has a longer aftertaste. Sometimes the meal you most want to cook is the one you learned how to make too late.

Po & Pilar is located at 227 Salcedo Street, Legazpi Village, Makati City. Book a reservation today.