Johanne Siy: Global Table, Filipino Roots

Johanne Siy’s career before becoming a chef included sitting in a Procter & Gamble focus group room, watching consumers talk about detergent and household goods. It never stayed on detergent for long.

“All the questions led back to how the mother takes care of the family and shows her care and love for her children and the family through cooking,” she says. The pattern stuck with her—how one act could sit at both ends of human need at once. “I don’t know a lot of professions where you have something as simple as a basic need that you need for survival, but at the same time it spans the whole breadth of the hierarchy of needs. It can lead at the highest level to self-actualization.” (Article continues after the video.)

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It wasn’t an obvious pivot. Johanne grew up in Dagupan, Pangasinan, cooking for her family from the time she was 9 or 10, taking over Noche Buena, feeding her grateful brothers who were “always hungry” after long days at school, she says, laughing. But professional cooking wasn’t on the table.

“We were the generation when no one aspired to be a kusinera, right? It was just not aspirational at that point for a lot of people,” she says. Taking a predictable, though practical, path, she built an impressive career in brand marketing in Singapore instead, until the question caught up with her. “We were the generation who started asking early, is there more to life?”

For her, the answer was New York. Johanne is also quick to acknowledge circumstance. The timing mattered: Chefs were becoming public figures rather than anonymous craftsmen, which made a late-career leap feel just a little less improbable.

Johanne enrolled at the International Culinary Center older than most of her classmates, aware that the profession’s physical demands and traditional career path favoured the young. She deliberately sought out the most demanding opportunities she could find (including a stint at Noma), staging wherever possible and volunteering at James Beard Foundation events simply for the chance to work alongside chefs she admired.

She eventually landed at Le Bernardin—Eric Ripert’s three-Michelin-star seafood restaurant—which, for a chef raised in the salt capital of the Philippines, had an obvious pull. What she took from it wasn’t technique so much as clarity of purpose.

“The fish is the star of the plate; that’s what we focused on. Nothing else mattered,” she says of the kitchen’s ethos—one that let Le Bernardin do 300 covers a night at three-star level, which she still calls “one of those anomalies of fine dining.”

That clarity followed her into how she thought about her own cuisine. Like many chefs of her generation who trained abroad, Johanne spent years treating Filipino food as something to suppress rather than serve: staff meal, not menu. That changed after she’d already left Le Bernardin, when Ripert asked for her adobo recipe to use as a sauce for monkfish.

“It makes you think about things that you’ve always taken for granted and never quite valued, because it’s just the way that perception was shaped,” she says. It coincided with a broader moment in fine dining, as chefs across Asia grew more confident defining excellence on their own terms rather than measuring themselves against Western traditions.

These days, her process starts long before a pan touches heat. She travels through provinces meeting farmers and producers, trying to understand not only an ingredient but the land that shaped it, the people who grew it, and the principles behind their craft before she thinks about a dish.

“I see myself more these days as like a conduit, not so much as a creator,” she says. She wants diners to experience not simply her cooking, but the work of everyone who brought the ingredient to the plate. “It takes a certain level of maturity,” Johanne says, “a lot of trial and error and failure, to get to the point where you’re not getting in the way of the ingredient expressing itself.”

That same instinct extends to the plate itself. Johanne has little interest in embellishment for its own sake. At Michelin-selected Lolla, she and her team were “being true to what we believed,” she says. “Ingredient-centric, being authentic on the plate—not too much fluff. At the end of the day, there’s already so much work that has gone on behind the scenes. That’s enough. You don’t have to overly garnish something just to make it look pretty when the essence of it is captured in a few essential ingredients.”

For Johanne, authenticity is something guests recognize instinctively, just as much as the team that brings a restaurant to life. “It’s that authenticity to what you believe in, and the belief in what you’re doing, that you’re able to translate also with everyone in the team,” she says. “When you see the expression on people’s faces that you made them happy and you’re able to connect with them for that one brief moment, it’s immeasurable.”

That philosophy shaped Lolla, the Singapore restaurant that led to her own recognition as Asia’s Best Female Chef in 2023. But as gratifying as those accolades have been, she’s careful not to let them become the measure of her work.

“Even if you hold yourself up to a high standard, knowing that there are other people who believe you deserve that award—do you hold yourself up to an even higher standard so that you are worthy of that recognition?” she muses.

Her exacting laser-focus also shaped how she ran a kitchen. Rather than run a strict brigade, Johanne asked every cook who joined her one question first: “What is your end goal?” The answer determined how she mentored them—whether their ambitions lay in pastry, restaurant ownership, research, or teaching—because alignment, not hierarchy, is what allowed Lolla to exceed even her own expectations. “The team owned the restaurant. They managed it like it was their own business.”

Her advice to anyone weighing a similar leap is characteristically succinct. “For me, life is short. Do it,” she says. “You just need to make sure that your heart is in it. Is it something that you love? Because that is what sustains you during the tough times. If you’re not getting paid to do what you do, would you still be doing it? That should be the question that you need to answer.”

Johanne is building her next restaurant, Aro, in Singapore, set to open in September 2026 [as of press time, the restaurant is open for reservations]. It’s a place Johanne says is more personal than anything she’s done. People keep asking whether she will eventually open a restaurant in the Philippines.

“Not yet,” she says. “I feel like we all have a role to play.”

For now, hers is in Singapore, introducing the ingredients, the craftsmanship, and the stories of home to an audience that’s only beginning to meet them.

This article originally appeared in Robb Report Philippines’ Muse Issue, July 2026.