A Balancing Act

At The Test Kitchen, award-winning chef Josh Boutwood pushes the envelope with regard to flavour and culinary innovation

In a quiet, unassuming area in Makati, Bistro Group executive chef Josh Boutwood is pushing the envelope with regard to food and great dining.

In the daytime, it’s the Bistro Academy, the Bistro Group’s training and incubation centre for young people seeking careers in the restaurant industry. But when 4pm rolls around, everything changes.

“It’s still a learning kitchen,” Boutwood explains. “But, by four in the afternoon, we turn it into a dining room.”

This is The Test Kitchen, a place that offers a rather unique, even novel, dining experience for those seeking something completely different from what’s currently on in the local dining scene. Here, Boutwood takes a whimsical, rather adventurous approach to cooking. “What we do here in the evenings is not what we test for our restaurants during the day,” he says.

The Test Kitchen’s concept is loosely based on omakase, the Japanese way of putting one’s self into the chef ’s hands, allowing him to be as creative and innovative with the ingredients and techniques used for the meal. That said, there is no set menu: diners place their trust entirely in Boutwood and his team. In doing so, they get to explore more flavours, colours, and textures than they are used to.

In truth, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Boutwood is pushing things till they border on insanity—but a delicious sort of insanity, for that matter.

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