How Brooklyn Restaurant Purple Yam Fueled the Filipino Food Movement

On August 30, Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan will — for the last time — serve food at Purple Yam, the Filipino restaurant in Brooklyn that they opened in 2009. Running a restaurant has become a challenge for the couple both physically and financially. Besa remembers, for example, the days when she and Dorotan used chanterelles and other foraged mushrooms generously; the pancit bihon at their previous restaurant, Cendrillon, was once full of them, but wild mushrooms are unaffordable now. “Especially in these economic times, it’s very hard to do what we were doing,” Besa says. “That’s why we think our era is at an end.”

The Filipino food scene that Besa and Dorotan are leaving behind is completely different from the one that existed when they started. Today, ube is everywhere; Kasama in Chicago has a Michelin star — the first for a Filipino restaurant. But when Besa and Dorotan first expressed interest in doing Filipino food in New York City, they were met with resistance: Nobody would get it.

There is a common sentiment among the Filipino food community across the United States today: What we do now has been made possible by Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan. “I feel like Amy and Romy are like the ninang and ninong of everything that’s happening now,” says Genevieve Villamora, who was an owner and operator of Washington D.C.’s Bad Saint, itself a force in pushing Filipino food forward. In translation: Besa and Dorotan are the modern Filipino food movement’s godparents. Their legacy lives in every kamayan dinner and every ube dessert, as Filipino cuisine in the U.S. continues to transcend even the diaspora’s wildest expectations.

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Before Purple Yam, Besa and Dorotan opened the Soho restaurant Cendrillon in 1995, with Dorotan in charge of the kitchen. When Ruth Reichl reviewed Cendrillon for the New York Times, she hailed Dorotan’s approach to Filipino food, calling it “extraordinary, looking backward and half a world away while leaping forward.”

Though Cendrillon is often now remembered as a Filipino restaurant, Besa and Dorotan never intended to call it one. They knew from the start that their food wouldn’t be traditional, and opted for a “pan-Asian” label as an attempt to shield themselves from the complaints they knew would be inevitable — that Filipinos would look at Cendrillon’s food and say, “That’s not my mother’s.”

“As contemporary Filipino American chefs, we’re often faced with the reality of tradition versus authenticity,” says Nico de Leon, executive chef and co-owner of Los Angeles’s Lasita. Lasita was born out of Lasa, a pop-up-turned-restaurant that, in the mid 2010s, exemplified modern Filipino cuisine in LA. For Dorotan to do Filipino food with this “nonconformist” approach was “something we needed to see: that we could take our cuisine to the next level,” de Leon says. “Romy was that person.”

But non-Filipino diners’ lack of familiarity with the cuisine posed its own challenges. Even those in the food world who respected Dorotan’s cooking pushed back against the concept of a Filipino restaurant. “They said, ‘Don’t do that. Nobody will come,’” Besa recalls. While today’s Asian American chefs now have the freedom to be unapologetic in their approach — to say fuck you to all that, as Besa puts it — “we still came from the immigrant mode,” she says. “There was that barrier, that glass ceiling.”

The name Cendrillon, which was borrowed from a French Cinderella ballet, not only distanced the couple from the constraints of tradition but also spoke to how they perceived their position in the food world. “That resonated with us: We were the Cinderella of Asian food,” Besa says.

Still, Cendrillon succeeded, offering dishes like oxtail kare-kare, roasted duck with mango chutney, and black rice paella. Its reasonable prices for the neighborhood earned Besa and Dorotan loyal fans, both Filipino and non. Filipinos, even those outside NYC, talked about Cendrillon with pride, and the restaurant scored Dorotan an appearance on Martha Stewart Living. The year of its 10th anniversary, Frank Bruni, having stepped into the role of Times critic, reviewed Cendrillon. He, like Reichl, hailed Dorotan’s innovation, writing that Cendrillon didn’t “cook or act in predictable, populist, homogenized ways.”

Villamora recalls eating Besa and Dorotan’s food in the late ’90s: a splurge New Year’s Eve visit to Cendrillon with her sister when she was a recent college graduate. With its Soho location and its modern but warm interiors, the restaurant felt special from the start, Villamora says: “I remember thinking, Wow, I’ve never been in a Filipino restaurant like this.”

Having grown up within Chicago’s large Filipino community, Villamora was no stranger to Filipino home cooking nor no-frills turo-turo joints. The food at Cendrillon felt simultaneously familiar and new. “It gave me the sense that the cuisine was really alive,” Villamora says. “That it was still evolving, and that it could change — and I could still recognize it and still enjoy it.”

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Besa and Dorotan ran Cendrillon until 2009, when rent in Soho became prohibitive. The couple eyed Ditmas Park in Brooklyn for their next move. After 9/11 and the 2003 citywide blackout, they wanted the ability to walk home if they had to. “This time we will embrace our culture — let’s name it Purple Yam,” Besa says of the new restaurant, which opened in late 2009.

Dorotan had been using purple yam in everything — pizza, ice cream, noodles. Better known by its proper name, ube, the vegetable is now a global sensation that has transcended the boundaries of Filipino cuisine alone. In 2009, the name Purple Yam won out because Besa thought people would butcher the pronunciation of ube.

Bobby Punla, chef of the modern Filipino pop-up Likha Eats in the Bay Area, fondly recalls being a regular at Purple Yam around 2013. He’d visit a few times a month on early dates with his now-wife. The restaurant felt welcoming, like being in Besa in Dorotan’s home: Besa would be telling stories; Dorotan would be in the kitchen, emerging to present new flavors of ice cream for dessert. Indeed, Sam Sifton once called Purple Yam “a perfect neighborhood restaurant.”

Dining at Purple Yam marked a turning point in Punla’s interest in Filipino food. Working in fine dining at the time, “I was like, I don’t really know how to cook my own culture’s food,” Punla says. At Purple Yam, he tried certain dishes — like beef tapa — for the first time, associating the restaurant with finally connecting him to his roots.

The publication of Besa and Dorotan’s cookbook Memories of Philippine Kitchens in 2006 expanded the couple’s influence even further. (It received an update in 2014 but is now out of print.) As Besa writes in the introduction, the book was guided by a “desire to document traditions, to bring Philippine food into the twenty-first century while preserving the strong foundation of our past.”

Memories of Philippine Kitchens became the de facto primer to Filipino food. The book tells family stories and explains in great detail the ingredients, techniques, and heritage of Filipino cuisine. De Leon recalls discovering it as a young cook. “That book became our bible, more or less. We referenced it almost daily when we were writing menus,” he says.

For Ken Concepcion, owner of the Los Angeles culinary bookstore Now Serving, Memories of Philippine Kitchens was the first time he’d seen an American cookbook put Filipino cuisine in the spotlight. “To see my own heritage reflected in something that anybody could pick up and learn about was really special,” he says. “It was like a watershed, landmark book.” It established the cuisine in the American cookbook canon.

In recent years, the shelf of Filipino cookbooks published in the U.S. has grown full. These are books that are specific about their positioning within the diaspora (take Angela Dimayuga and Ligaya Mishan’s Filipinx) or that prioritize riffs over replication (take Abi Balingit’s Mayumu). “The books out now, I really feel like they wouldn’t have been there — or it would have been a lot tougher to get written and published — if [Besa and Dorotan’s] book wasn’t there before,” Concepcion says.

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Becoming the de facto spokespeople for Filipino cuisine on the global stage was, for Besa and Dorotan never the goal: They simply wanted to make unique food with integrity and with advocacy for Philippine ingredients and history. Look at Italy, Besa explains: You can taste it through the imported olive oils, cheeses, and pastas; you understand heirloom production and terroir. “I wanted the same thing for the Philippines,” she says.

Besa and Dorotan were the first commercial partners of Eighth Wonder, which sold heirloom rice from farmers in the Cordillera region of northern Luzon. The mountainous area in the northernmost part of the Philippines is known for its verdant rice terraces. But with the Philippines, a predominantly white rice country, heirloom rice varieties were at risk, says Mary Hensley, who founded Eighth Wonder. The goal of Eighth Wonder and its associated Cordillera Heirloom Rice Project was to “to preserve the cultural connection of these Indigenous people to the rice and preserve the rice terraces,” Hensley says.

Not only did the couple bring attention to Hensley’s work by serving the rice in their restaurants, but Besa also connected Hensley with other Filipino chefs. “The visibility that Amy and Romy gave to my rice was huge,” Hensley says. The couple used Cordillera heirloom rice until 2019, when Hensley ended her business. “It really fits into, what I think is [Besa’s] personal mission of resurrecting or honoring or trying to keep alive a number of Indigenous foods from the Philippines, whether they’re the old vinegars and souring agents, or the way they used to make salt, or the heirloom rice varieties that still exist.”

Besa and Dorotan’s approach to Filipino cooking — and to the very idea of a Filipino restaurant — “made an indelible imprint on me in terms of thinking about, How do we talk about our own food?,” says Villamora of Bad Saint. For so long, perspectives on Filipino food had felt exoticized or superficial. In pop culture, “it wasn’t often Filipinos talking about our own food,” she says. Besa and Dorotan offered a perspective of context, curiosity, and care.

Eating their food on subsequent occasions, “I had this sense of something profound happening,” Villamora says: that the new incarnation of Filipino food before her was the result of “deep understanding and deep thinking about what our food can be.” This kind of thinking influenced Bad Saint, where Besa and Dorotan’s influence also played out in the decision to name dishes in Tagalog or their regional language, or in the context with which they explained dishes to guests.

It comes down to the idea of lineage — the way that Besa and Dorotan have always brought history and complexity into their cooking, but also the way their advocacy of the cuisine and its ingredients has allowed Filipino food to flourish today. “Even if people are not necessarily replicating the approach that Amy and Romy have taken, even if they’re doing ube shakes with burgers and fries, whether they know [it] or not, that is possible because of work that Amy and Romy have done,” Villamora says.

In 2018, Ligaya Mishan wrote in the New York Times that Filipino food had “found a place in the [American] mainstream,” pointing to the broader success of restaurants such as Bad Saint, Lasa, and Nicole Ponseca’s Jeepney and Maharlika in NYC. It turned out that wasn’t even the apex. What has happened in the years since has been remarkable: the rise of diasporic bakeries and fusion takeout spots, the establishment of Filipino fine dining as its own category, the adoption of Filipino ingredients in non-Filipino cuisines. Filipino food has gone from a rarity to another part of the culinary landscape; we don’t have to do quite as many introductions. The sense that any one chef or any one restaurant must speak for the entire culture has dissipated — so many more perspectives are in the spotlight.

That the cuisine has reached the heights it has today is “more than what I had hoped for,” Besa says. Still, in recent years, she could sense that this boom was coming. “You could feel the hunger and the thirst of so many Filipinos and Filipino Americans wanting to express their love for their culture through food. How do you express that? You open up a restaurant.”

As much as Besa knows that younger Filipino chefs see her and Dorotan as inspiration, it was never their goal to tell people how to do things. “Whatever inspires you, you take that and then you own it,” she says. “You do it your way.”

Jutharat ‘Poupay’ Pinyodoonyachet is a New York-based photographer.