A seat at the table

I was born in Jolo, Sulu, and grew up in Zamboanga City, in a family of Muslims and Christians. Food was how we gathered, whatever we believed.

I fell in love with cooking when I was eight, in my grandmother Oswalda Alcantara-Cabel’s kitchen in Sulu. Children weren’t sent away from the fire there. We were allowed to watch, to ask and to help.

My mother, Melissa Cabel, raised us on her food businesses. Between the two of them I learned to cook the Tausug way: by feel, by smell and by memory, not from written recipes.

I studied nursing at Ateneo de Zamboanga University and worked as a nurse for two years. Cooking stayed what I did for the people I loved.

In college I rented a booth at the Ateneo Fiesta and sold my mother’s piyanggang manok. It sold out, again and again. That was when I believed people outside our home would want this food too.

On family trips to Manila, I noticed that Filipino restaurants never served the food I grew up with. I found it only in Muslim-owned stalls in Quiapo, at Dulang in Ermita and at Maranao kiosks in Greenhills. Our food was in Luzon, but you had to know where to look.

So in May 2017 I opened Palm Grill on Tomas Morato, the first restaurant in Luzon given over to the food of Zamboanga, Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi. Some guests read the menu and walked out. I took that as a reason to reach more people, not fewer.

At first, to make the menu easier, piyanggang manok was “Green Chicken”. A few years in, I saw that renaming our food was erasing it, so I put every Tausug name back.

That was the turning point. The guests who came looking for the real thing kept coming.

With my brother King and my sister Isabel, I opened Cabel in the 1930s Casa Roces house across from Malacañang. It carries our mother’s family name, and its menu runs from north to south: Tausug dishes on the same page as adobo, kare-kare and pakbet. Filipino cuisine is the regional cuisines.

The year began with tiyula itum on the Best Ever Food Review Show. Sonny Side gave it five stars and called it one of the best foods he’d had in the Philippines, the first time the show gave its seal of approval to a Filipino restaurant. From its humble beginnings as a lowly black beef soup of the south, tiyula itum now stands for our nation’s bold, rich and diverse flavours.

That January, Nelson Canlas and my sister Isabel published Si Migoy, Ang Batang Tausug, a children’s book about the boy I was in Sulu. In August, Nelson and I followed it with Ang Kwento ni Putli Mandi. Both are printed in Tagalog, English and Bahasa Sug, and in October I went to the Frankfurt Book Fair as one of the Philippines’ delegates.

That June, Netflix’s I Love Filipino featured me as a voice of Mindanao food. I cooked chicken piyanggang beside the Mindanao food historian Datu Shariff Pendatun.

In the first Philippine MICHELIN Guide, both Palm Grill and Cabel received a Bib Gourmand. I became the first Tausug chef the Guide has recognised.

When I learned that both my restaurants were given Bib Gourmand, I felt it wasn’t just my story being told. To be the first Tausug recognised this way means the hands, the time and the faith of our cooks are finally honoured too. In 2026, the House of Representatives commended the work in Resolution No. 872.

In October 2026, the second Philippine MICHELIN Guide kept both Palm Grill and Cabel on its Bib Gourmand list. When we were recognised the first time, I made it a point to use it to propel my advocacy and take Mindanao cuisine beyond the tables of our restaurants.

The recognition opened doors beyond our own dining rooms: a kitchen takeover at the Manila Marriott, a seven-course dinner at the Admiral, live demonstrations for 150 chefs at the Department of Tourism’s masterclass, and students’ cooking to judge. In October, four Palm Grill dishes reached 7-Eleven shelves, the first from a Mindanaoan and Tausug chef in its Chef Creations series.

It has helped our suppliers too: the farming and fishing communities in Mindanao who send us our coconut, spices and seafood.

After nine years in Metro Manila, Palm Grill is coming home to Zamboanga, on the third level of SM City Zamboanga. And I’m working on a fine-dining tasting menu given over entirely to Tausug cooking, to tell the story of Sulu’s kitchens in full.