To Chef Myke “Tatung” Sarthou, food has always been more than sustenance. It is language, leadership, and legacy. With Pinas Simpol: The Love and Lore of Filipino Cooking, he elevates that belief into a powerful cultural statement: one that explores how the Filipino kitchen shapes not only taste but also thought.
Launched at Lore by Chef Tatung in Bonifacio Global City, the Michelin-selected 2026 restaurant he leads, the book is part memoir and part philosophy, redefining cooking as both art and a civic act.
“To cook is to care,” Chef Tatung said. “It is a form of leadership: one that listens, nurtures, and remembers.”
Throughout the book, food becomes a metaphor for character and community. The ability to stretch ingredients without stretching love, to feed many from little, and to welcome strangers with warmth: these, he argues, are lessons in resilience and compassion that mirror the Filipino spirit.
The book also marks his tenth year as an author and storyteller. From his debut Philippine Cookery: From Heart to Platter in 2017 to Simpol Dishkarte in 2023, Chef Tatung has earned four Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and inspired a movement that dignifies everyday Filipino cooking.
“This trilogy gives language to our pride,” he said. “It’s time our cuisine is seen as intelligent, coherent, and emotionally powerful.”
In Pinas Simpol, the kitchen becomes the first classroom of culture, where leadership is learned through care and collaboration. “Technique alone cannot sustain identity,” he reminds readers. “Culture must stay in the kitchen.”
The book’s essays explore themes such as the “dirty kitchen” as a symbol of authenticity, the diaspora as the new global kitchen, and sawsawan as a form of culinary democracy: an act of personal agency expressed through taste.
Through these stories, Chef Tatung redefines food writing itself, blending anthropology, philosophy, and memoir into what he calls a “manifesto for coherence.”
Published by Vertikal Kreatives Inc., Pinas Simpol retails for ₱790 and is available online and soon in major bookstores nationwide.
“Filipino food is not chaos,” Chef Tatung concludes. “It is coherence. It is how we remember who we are.”
