Two Michelin Stars Later, Josh Boutwood Is Looser, Bolder, Better at Helm

Josh Boutwood’s cooking at Helm has always been controlled: clean lines, precise temperatures, no garnish without a job. His new “Single Ingredient” menu retains that discipline while revealing a more obsessive intelligence: each course begins with one ingredient, and Boutwood and his team roast it, ferment it, poach it, render it, or turn its discarded parts into something unexpectedly desirable.

The work must be tremendous, but at dinner, almost none of that effort shows. The team might prepare and assemble the dishes silently and mechanically right in front of you—always an awesome sight—but that dollop of sauce they’re pouring over with a nondescript spoon? It had been simmering over a fire for 3 days straight.

While every dish was exceptional and illustrative of the theme, perhaps the most obvious was a dish built around pumpkin, arriving without the strain that often accompanies technically ambitious cooking. There is pumpkin custard, diced pumpkin, roasted pumpkin seeds, pumpkin seed oil, and a lacto-ferment, while the pumpkin skin, by culinary magic, becomes XO sauce. The dish succeeds because it makes pumpkin taste unusually, profoundly complete.

Boutwood’s previous “Monochromatic” menu arranged its ideas through color. It was elegant and intellectually tidy, and as Boutwood created courses based on a single color, it felt like watching him play the New York Times‘ Connections: finding disparate ingredients that just so happen to have the same coloring, making it taste incredible, and credible, all together. “Single Ingredient” is more like a three-dimensional sudoku: difficult, absorbing, and governed by rules that make each solution more impressive. One ingredient gives the kitchen a boundary against which to push, and the resulting food reveals the more curious, faintly mad-scientist side of the chef. The plates feel freer, even when their construction is anything but. But do they taste good?

They do, and this is probably my favorite of his menus so far.

The first course, tuna, has akami and otoro meet a coconut leche de tigre carrying galangal, kaffir lime, tomato, kombu jelly, tuna-roe foam, and tomato powder. One might understand where Boutwood is going with all the acidity, but take one bite and it’s far more well-rounded: fatty tuna, bright acid, marine salinity and a restrained current of heat, while the tomato, in its different forms, serves as a surprisingly sweet note.

Then there’s the lobster, poached at 59.5 degrees, swimming in a rich, fish-bone broth, shrimp oil, and crustacean sabayon: divine. It’s one of those dishes you wish you could order a big bowl of, a la carte. Same with the cod fillet. It’s joined by cured cod (bacalao), skin, and bones, accompanied by cauliflower purée, kombu cream, dill oil, and pickled kohlrabi.

Lamb comes as terrine and roasted tenderloin, joined by a tablea-and-chili mole, lamb jus, watercress, and onion. The Japanese A5 wagyu that follows is the meal at its most maximal: aged miso, sunchoke cooked in wagyu fat, fermented root vegetables, bone marrow sauce, and tendon chicharon. It is unapologetically decadent and a great way to punctuate the end of the meal—and yet, there’s dessert: a caramelized white chocolate sauce beneath an assembly of flourless chocolate cake, chocolate ice cream, and chocolate foam, topped with a delicate and gel-like, marbled chocolate disk.

Even the palate cleanser wasn’t free of technique and effort. Lychee sorbet with cucumber, apple, and nata de coco resets the senses and can stand on its own as a dessert.

“It’s never about a single dish,” Boutwood says. “It’s really the progression of the menu that tells the story.” The progression does matter, but each course is so fully realized that almost any one of them could stand alone as an à la carte dish.

Helm became the Philippines’ first and only two-Michelin-starred restaurant when the inaugural national selection was announced in 2025. Recognition at that level can make a restaurant cautious, particularly when everyone begins examining dinner for proof that the distinction was deserved. “Single Ingredient” responds with confidence and still with the genuine playfulness that is Boutwood’s signature. The menu is perhaps Boutwood’s strongest work in the past year and a half. Its pleasures come from witnessing an obsessive kitchen think aloud, then tasting dishes polished enough to conceal all the difficult thinking that produced them.

Single Ingredient is served at Helm, The Shops at Ayala Triangle Gardens, Makati, for PHP7,500 per person, inclusive of VAT and subject to a 10 percent service charge. Reservations may be made through the website.