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Article (news)

Billy Dec

Yong Chavez

ABS-CBN News North America

<div><iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jFEJY4F1XYs?&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;rel=0" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable"></iframe> </div>For Billy Dec, food has always been a record of where he came from, who he was expected to become and the parts of himself he spent years trying to hide.On a Zoom call in early August, Dec was sitting in his Nashville office, wearing a dark shirt and the hat that has become part of his signature look. Around him, the office was in the middle of a move. The trucks had come through. In a couple of days, he would be headed for Tampa, Florida. “You know, I’m an island kid,” he said. “So I always want to live on the water.” It was an offhand comment, though it offered a useful key to Dec’s story. For all the cities he has stayed in, the businesses he has built and the rooms he has learned to command, he has spent much of his life searching for a place that feels like home.That search runs through “Food Roots,” the documentary that follows Dec through the Philippines as he searches for his family’s recipes and explores the history underneath them. It took seven years to make and eventually became something much larger than a collection of Filipino recipes. The movie is available on PBS and YouTube. <div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1787906496387FoodRoots_TitlePoster_020426-1.jpg" style="width:500px" class="fr-fic fr-dib"/></div>Dec is a restaurateur and entrepreneur whose résumé has taken him from law school and nightclubs to television, Hollywood, the White House, and his Sunda New Asian restaurants. He has spent years learning how to be useful in almost any room. The documentary asks what happens when a person who has become very good at chasing success finally turns toward the family history underneath it.The catalyst was grief. Dec lost two of his family elders in the Philippines in one day, leaving one surviving elder. With that loss came an old regret: He had never learned his family’s recipes from his Lola. He had been busy doing what he believed America required of him: chasing credentials, jobs, opportunities, and the next proof that he belonged. “I just always had this guilt that I never learned the recipes of our family just because I was always working and hustling and doing all the things that America said you had to do and become,” he said.His original plan was simple. His sister would accompany him and write down the recipes while he coaxed the instructions from their elders. When she became pregnant and could not make the trip, Dec called creatives he had worked with in the Philippines and asked them to record the cooking.There was a practical complication: His relatives did not cook using standardized measurements but made local dishes from memory, instinct, and experience. Dec knew he would have to figure out the quantities later. The footage initially suggested a series of cooking segments. Then PBS expressed interest. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, the pandemic arrived. The documentary was supposed to premiere in May 2020. PBS asked productions whether they wanted to pause as the world shut down. Dec agreed. <div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1787906584129Michele Josue directing Billy Dec att.4WiHNF8UAhExqIXGRIQ8CuNt4dZQ5HjVWL7THJ6rYPo.JPG" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/>Michele Josue directing Billy Dec. Photo courtesy of Michele Josue</div>The project might have remained suspended indefinitely if he had not met Michele Josue, who became its director, and Doug Blush, its executive producer. Their involvement changed Dec’s sense of what he was making. “And when they came aboard, I said, ‘Oh, now it’s a very serious documentary. Now it has all the street cred.’ It was pretty much around then that I knew that we were doing something significant.”The significance has little to do with celebrity, even though Dec’s life contains plenty of it. He once moderated a Filipino American History Month celebration at the White House, bringing celebrities to a panel that included Jo Koy, Apl.de.Ap, and Chef Cristeta Comerford, the first Filipino American White House executive chef. Dec became a presidential appointee during the Obama administration, serving on the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. It was a distinction that might have seemed improbable when he was a kid learning that the food his family loved could become a source of embarrassment outside the house.He grew up in a multigenerational family where Tagalog was spoken and Filipino food was cooked constantly by his Lola. “There’s nothing more lovely than being loved by your family through food,” he said. <div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1787906635526SD_KamayanFeast_2017_95_edit.jpg" style="width:500px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="500"/>Scene from &#x27;Food Roots.&#x27; Food Roots</div>For years, that was his understanding of Filipino cuisine: It was the food of love, family, and belonging. Then came middle school, when classmates began mocking him for the food he brought to school or encountered at his house. Something that had represented home suddenly became a reason to feel othered.The family remained the center of his life, yet the world outside that family taught him to manage the distance between his private self and the person he presented publicly. “I had to play a new personality. I had to be a new type of person.”His code-switching eventually grew beyond school. He learned to read rooms, anticipate expectations, and adjust himself accordingly. The skill became especially useful in the restaurant business, where he learned to navigate the moods of customers, staff, and strangers with the instincts of someone who had spent his life studying what other people needed from him.Before he was a restaurateur, Dec had worked security, served tables, and spent years in nightclubs. He describes the work as a form of live entertainment, one that requires constant observation. “You are literally a chameleon, and you are constantly assessing people’s wants and needs, their thoughts. You’re a mind reader.” He had performed in school plays, and although people around him assumed he would pursue acting, he didn’t have time to chase creative outlets when he was younger. Later, as his philanthropic work attracted media attention, television producers began asking him to host. A friendship with actor David Schwimmer led to an invitation to appear on “Friends” while Schwimmer was filming the show. Dec was struck by the machinery behind the finished product, the armies of people and individual decisions that had to align for a few minutes of television to work.<div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1787906720290Billy Dec Food Roots CJs Empanadas.jpg" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/>Scene from &#x27;Food Roots.&#x27; Food Roots</div>He saw something familiar in that machinery. Restaurants also depended on hundreds of small decisions converging into a single experience. The realization helped explain why acting felt strangely comfortable. “So if I could take a day or two to join someone else’s world and be part of their story, and literally become someone different for a little bit, it’s such a cool thing for me, a privilege for me to be able to be around people like that.”The same adaptability that helped him survive became part of the problem. Dec eventually found himself operating eight different concepts with 800 employees while juggling restaurant commitments, the White House, hosting and other ventures. His mentors and advisers helped him recognize a more uncomfortable truth: He was doing too much, and the accumulation of accomplishments had begun to resemble another form of hiding.Sunda felt different. The restaurant connected him to his Asian heritage. “It felt natural. It felt celebratory. It felt exciting, empowering, enlightening, invigorating. It didn’t feel like work.” He began divesting from businesses that no longer gave him that sense of purpose and concentrating on the ventures that did. He also built COACT, a creative agency whose name stands for collaborative action, an idea that mirrors his approach to business: Take the people and influences around you and turn them into something new.That philosophy is visible in the food itself. At a recent tasting in Chicago, Dec gathered chefs from different Sunda locations to develop dishes for Filipino American History Month. There was kaldereta transformed into a pot pie, ginataang kuhol reimagined with mussels, ube drinks and cocktails inspired by childhood desserts such as banana cue. Dec described the experience with the enthusiasm of someone who still finds it thrilling to discover what Filipino food can become.His affection for that inventiveness comes from his own mixed upbringing. His mother is from Quezon City, and family travels took him around Southeast Asia. His father was Eastern European. The refrigerator at home became a place where different culinary traditions could mingle. “There’s a permission to experiment,” he said, describing what he likes best about Filipino food. “It’s a necessity to evolve and stay resilient, always creating solutions.”He admits having a complicated relationship with the restaurant industry, despite his love for it. Dec knows the glamour from the outside and the exhaustion from the inside. He cannot watch “The Bear” because its chaos and pressure are too recognizable. He remembers periods when he worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for eight years. The stakes then were existential. “If this doesn’t work, I don’t know how I’m gonna eat, and I don’t know how I’m gonna contribute to my family eating,” he said.Those years left behind habits that now seem almost comical until you understand what they once meant. Someone recently complimented Dec on his soup. He explained that he had learned to make good soup from leftovers collected while working in restaurants. He would take catering trays that were going to be discarded, freeze them, cut everything up and turn them into stews and soups. “I’m the king of leftovers. I’m the king of repurposing those leftovers.”<div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1787906745030Billy Dec Food Roots School.jpg" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/>Scene from &#x27;Food Roots.&#x27; Food Roots</div>At this point in our interview, he reached for his backpack. Inside were snacks, plasticware and napkins from various restaurants. These are items he hoards just in case he needs them. “You just never know,” he said, laughing. He joked that the habit is one he shares with many Filipinos.He still wears a rubber band around his wrist. The rubber band carries a deeper memory. As a child in the Philippines, Dec saw his cousins playing with rubber bands and finding happiness in simple things. Back in America, he watched children complain about toys they considered inadequate. The contrast stayed with him. During some of the darkest periods of his life, he wore a rubber band as a reminder of those cousins and the happiness they found without having everything he thought people were supposed to have.“There’s happiness in just that,” he said. He also shared a funny story about using his rubber-band shooting skills to stun a bee in his house after his mother asked him to deal with it, à la Spider-Man with his web shooters. “I have the best rubber-band hand,” he jokingly boasted.The documentary asks viewers to see the person behind the practiced public persona, and Dec had spent decades constructing an image of competence, confidence, and momentum. That image helped him survive, but it also made vulnerability difficult.“For me it was very tough to be able to show people that truth,” he said, referring to the mental-health struggles within his family and the stigma surrounding those conversations when he was growing up. The pandemic shifted his perspective. Watching people suffer on a global scale made his own discomfort feel smaller. If telling his story could help someone else, he decided, protecting the old version of himself had lost its value.He credits Josue with earning his trust. That trust allowed the film to reach the places Dec had spent years guarding. With food serving as the entry point, the documentary became an excavation of family, grief, identity, and mental health.The most painful family memories involve Dec’s father and brother, who both suffered from serious mental health issues before passing away. His brother Anthony was an artist, and Dec imagines he would have recognized the documentary as an act of creative expression. His father loved stories and Filipino culture, and Dec believes he would have embraced the film for those reasons. Seven years of work eventually produced a finished movie on PBS, a result Dec describes with some disbelief even now.<div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1787906763369Billy Dec Food Roots Tricycle.jpg" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/>Scene from &#x27;Food Roots.&#x27; Food Roots</div>There is another reason he wanted to finish it. “I have a thing where I live for my brother too.” When he faces a choice between the easy road and the more creative one, he thinks about which path his brother might have taken. Then he follows that instinct. “I’m just living for two.”Dec finds opportunities to rest at the gym, where his computer cannot reach him, and in brief windows between obligations. In Chicago, during a packed stretch of work, he found time to sit at Wrigley Field with a hot dog and watch a game. Another day, he got out on Lake Michigan.He calls these moments “two-hour slivers.” The phrase captures the strange economy of his life in which rest has to be claimed and sometimes squeezed between flights, restaurants, and business meetings. Surviving hungry years had made hustling his default setting. Although we did this interview virtually, I met Dec a few weeks earlier at a “Food Roots” reception in Fil-Am producer Lisa Lew’s Hollywood home. Between conversations with well-wishers, I caught him a few times looking around, as if searching. The look was similar to the way one scans a crowded room for hidden opportunities and connections — or an exit. But later at the Q&amp;A, when he started talking about his roots and his trip to the Philippines, the hints of restlessness were gone as he spoke about home and what it means to him.Soon he will be in Tampa, closer to the salt water he loves, with Sunda expanding and more projects ahead. He also dreams of returning to the Philippines. The deeper journey he took seems to be about something more enduring: Dec has spent years trying to become someone the world would recognize as successful. “Food Roots” seemed to have given him a reason to turn around and recognize himself.

In “Food Roots,” a seven-year documentary journey through the Philippines, Billy Dec returns to his family’s recipes — and confronts the parts of himself he once kept hidden.

In “Food Roots,” a seven-year documentary journey through the Philippines, Billy Dec returns to his family’s recipes — and confronts the parts of himself he once kept hidden.

How Filipino recipes brought Billy Dec home

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How Filipino recipes brought Billy Dec home

Yong Chavez,

ABS-CBN News North America

Published August 28, 2026 05:03 PM PHT

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