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Chef Myrna Segismundo is more than a chef, she's a celebrated force in Philippine gastronomy, known for championing and elevating Filipino cuisine on the global stage. With a career spanning decades, from managing some of the best hotels in New York to winning top prizes at culinary competitions and leading international food expos, she has become a powerful voice in the Philippine culinary scene.

Known as the mastermind behind the National Food Showdown, a prestigious culinary competition that brings together aspiring chefs, hospitality students, and industry professionals from across the country, Chef Myrna is inspiring a new generation of cooks, all the while keeping our food legacy alive and thriving.

As The Beat Asia sat down for a quick chat with the chef, it was clear that her passion for Filipino food went beyond recipes and techniques.

For Chef Myrna, food is rooted in storytelling, memory, experiences, and cultural pride. In our conversation, she reflected on her unconventional path to the kitchen, how she navigated hotel dining rooms, and how she continues to preserve and evolve Filipino cuisine through mentorship, advocacy, and innovation.

From Home Kitchen to Global Stage

Like most origin stories, Chef Myrna’s love for food started at home. Growing up in a big family with eleven siblings, she was exposed to one important aspect of Filipino cuisine — which is something to share with loved ones.

“I come from a very big family of 12 children, and I'm number 12. And as in any Filipino household, dining is more or less the center of our lives in the home,” she told The Beat Asia.

“And so we grew up eating in large numbers. As the siblings started to marry off, the family grew larger and larger, and before you knew it, the meals on weekends and special holidays were almost the size of a feast! Having been exposed to that, it follows that our interest in food was very strongly influenced by family life. My parents loved to host parties back in the '60s and '70s, and as a child, I wasn’t old enough to join the party, so I was always left somewhere in the back where the caterers were. My yaya (babysitter), who eventually became the main cook of the family, influenced me a lot, as well as my parents, who love to bring the family out to eat in restaurants and hotels during those days.”

Chef Myrna graduated with a degree in Hotel and Restaurant Administration from the University of the Philippines, but being an immigrant, she had to fly back to New York, where her career in hotel management began. It was from there that she became exposed to the Food and Beverage sector.

“I worked for several hotels at the front of the house. I started at the Waldorf Astoria and then moved on to two other hotels while living in New York. These were the Saint Moritz on the Park and the Sheraton Center. Even as my work was in the front of the house, my exposure to New York and its culture, particularly in the food scene, was something that helped my development as a food and beverage person as well.”

The chef told us how she returned to Manila upon her parents’ request and worked for two hotels. She began working as an assistant food and beverage manager at the Hilton, which assigned her to the F&B operations of both the front and back of the house. The chef mentioned how this experience exposed her to the kitchen more as she got involved with the people that she managed in that area.

“But it was when I moved out of the hotel, moving out from the bigger scene of the industry and into a smaller operation that really gave me more focus,” she stated, as she eventually pivoted to corporate dining for an exclusive restaurant in a bank.  

“I was forced to pay attention to kitchen operations because, having been skilled enough to handle the management part of food and beverage, it was in the kitchen where I felt I needed to get my hands dirty, roll up my sleeves, and work alongside my chefs. It was a very new experience for me. It was smaller but more dynamic, more challenging, and more enjoyable. Since it was an exclusive restaurant, it was extremely fancy and very demanding. It had a limited market, so it was also very challenging in the sense that I had to be very creative because I was feeding the top tier of the company and their VIP guests. It’s a very different animal. You literally walk up and down trying to figure out how you can be more creative and serve something new to the eyes and to the palate.”

Over the years, Chef Myrna learned a lot from the people she worked with in the kitchen. She told us how she realized that the people who moved up the ranks were extremely helpful in developing personal skills. “They knew how, but they didn’t know why,” she quoted, on how these workers’ skills are shaped and honed through experience.

She took on the challenge to provide them with the necessary tools and techniques, going back to the books to explain the “whys.” “It was a two-way thing. I learned from them and they learned from me and we worked very closely as a team,” she shared. “We both appreciated the fact that we would understand what we were doing now. And that was when I started joining culinary competitions.”

The chef also commented how it felt ironic that it was in Manila that she was able to appreciate what she experienced in New York and was able to apply all her learnings, being exposed to the front and back of the house, and understanding the entirety of the operations.

In the period that she joined culinary competitions, her interest in the craft grew. Her team won top awards in the restaurant division, which surprised many, considering they came from a smaller industry. Chef Myrna used this as an opportunity to hone her skills as a chef, a profession she described as something she got by accident.

“I needed to benchmark, because coming from the hotel and then moving into a smaller operation and then not even being open to the public, I didn't know if we were good or bad. The competitions kept us going. I was also starting to get burned out at the hotel, as it’s a very difficult job. I no longer wanted to follow that direction, although it was very promising. At the end of the day, it's what you do with what you have in front of you that really decides exactly where you're headed. So this is where we are now.”

On Reviving the Filipino Table

It’s clear to see that Chef Myrna’s career was shaped by her experiences in the industry and honed by hands-on work in the kitchens. She took up culinary courses, but the chef wouldn’t call herself someone fully schooled in a culinary program, and rather takes pride in the way she had learned all her skills on her own and with the people she worked with.

In 2009, Chef Myrna founded the National Food Showdown, an annual competition that revived some of the country’s earlier cook-offs, such as the Chefs on Parade — a competition she joined back when she was working in corporate dining. Born from her conviction that talented Filipino chefs need a platform to showcase their skills, heritage, and creativity, the culinary competition spans multiple regions and is divided into student and professional divisions. It also features diverse challenges such as classic and modern Filipino dish cook-offs, pastry and dessert rounds, as well as beverage categories.

Since its founding, the cook-off has served as a “Kitchen Olympics” for culinary students. When asked why she had put it up in the first place, Chef Myrna answered, “I felt for my people. I felt for these employees, these skilled workers who were not schooled. Also in the provinces, the lesser schools that have students who do not have the facilities and means to study and take a culinary course. I felt that, at least at the National Food Showdown, there would be a door that could open opportunities for them.”

The talented chef also mentioned that many young people have forgotten what Filipino cuisine truly is — how it all starts at the table, shared with stories and experiences.

“Like us, who grew up with home-cooked meals and were exposed to those things, I feel many in the new generation did not have that privilege. So there’s a lack of depth because now everything is about reconstruction, plating, or tasting menus. There’s nothing wrong with that. But do we want to promote our culinary culture in that manner? We weren't into molecular gastronomy. We weren’t into courses. We’re into sharing food — family style,” she said, perfectly describing the heart of Filipino cooking. 

The National Food Showdown has gone back to promoting these objectives in the hopes of encouraging the next generation to appreciate their cooking and cuisine, and for them to discover their ingredients. It also puts emphasis on sustainability, which, for Chef Myrna, is simply using locally sourced ingredients.

“Sustainability for me focuses on going local. When you support local ingredients and local produce, the topic of sustainability comes into the picture, because then you have to be able to supply the demand,” she said. “And another one would be to discover and appreciate cooking techniques and ingredients that are indigenous to the areas so that there is more creativity, there is more transfer of knowledge and experience. It follows that if there’s more focus on these things, there will be sustainability.”

More than establishing a national cook-off, Chef Myrna has also represented the country in various international food festivals. She shared with us one of her experiences where she collaborated with the Department of Tourism (DOT) and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) to hold food festivals across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. When asked about some of her most memorable moments, she told us about an observation that she turned into an actionable plan to gain more traction and meaningful transactions in their booths.

“So in the beginning, it was about holding food festivals in the hotels, but then I noticed that our only customers were Filipinos too, and so there doesn’t seem to be enough interest from the foreign market. As I got more confident and more exposed to these festivals, I started to suggest that we need to educate the market that we want to attract, which is not the Filipinos nor the overseas workers. Because why go abroad if you cannot attract the locals of that country?”

Chef Myrna suggested promoting festivals by way of lectures and cooking demonstrations to a select audience, such as the media, academe, suppliers, and importers. This way, more information is shared with them on the culture of Filipino cuisine, as well as the ingredients and cooking techniques unique to the Philippines.

She’s also a contributing author in one of the country’s most beloved culinary guidebooks, “Kulinarya,” where she shared ten classic Filipino recipes in collaboration with other renowned local chefs such as Chef Jessie Sincioco and the late Chef Margarita Forés.

She described the book as not an “end-all” but a start, considering many traditional dishes have one or more ways in which they can be made. Chef Myrna pointed out that “Kulinarya” is not a collection of standard recipes, but more of a representation of the best cooking techniques and practices from the contributing chefs.

We can say that Chef Myrna is a culinary icon, one who has made it her mission to preserve and revive Filipino heritage cooking and share it beyond our borders. The National Food Showdown continues on its 16th run, which will be held in September and October in various provinces such as Cebu (Sept. 27), Iloilo (Oct. 2 to 3), and Baguio (Oct. 9 to 11).

Additionally, Chef Myrna is also undertaking a Food Writing competition, which she dedicated to the late Doreen Gamboa Fernandez, a food critic icon and writer in the Philippines. The competition is slated for September and will also go alongside the very first Food Reel competition, which is presented in partnership with FEATR — a digital video channel from The Fat Kid Inside Studios founded by chef and celebrity food blogger, Erwan Heussaff. This year’s theme for both competitions is “Minatamis and Sweet Merienda Staples.”

For more information on how to join, click here.

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