(soft music) - Tell me about the documentary, about "Food Roots."

- Yeah, you know, it started just completely organic in a really unique way.

I always loved the food that my lola, is grandma in the Philippines, raised us on.

But you know, as we grew up, going back and forth to the Philippines or just growing up in a household with Filipino food cooked 24/7 and Tagalog spoken, I began to push away from it.

When I was in middle school, high school, there was a lot of bullying and other things, pressures to make you fit in.

And in my mind, I just knew that I always wanted to go back to the Philippines to learn those recipes that I wasn't ever there for.

You had to be present, they're not written down, they're story.

And so one day, two of my last three elders died on the same day and I dropped everything, 'cause I only, I knew there was one last remaining elder of that generation, and I just went to go search that out.

And I actually asked these shooters and editors, could they come with me so that, I wasn't writing things down, I wasn't consumed with documenting, I just wanted to be present and they could capture it.

And who, but a Detroit native, Doug Blush, who's a three-time Oscar winning executive producer and editor saw the footage and he was like, we can make something really wonderful about this.

Especially with this new director who was an Emmy winning Filipino director named Michele Josue that had done "Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine" and "Happy Jail", and some other really wonderful things.

They were like, listen, there's something going on that you're not talking about as we look at this footage, there's something you're skating around.

And it was just that they had saw some things I'd been wrestling with from, you know, family and emotion, and darkness, and you know, things lost, and they said, they started talking to me and my chef, and my sister and my, you know, my family, and captured all of this story that starts with food, but then it dives down to your roots, your culture, your heritage, your story, your lineage, your identity.

They're just master storytellers and they knew how to take what was really there and create something meaningful for all.

- Your newest restaurant is the Detroit location of Sunda, which has just recently opened.

Why did you end up picking Detroit as the new location for Sunda?

- Yeah, the foundation really, is that so many Michigan folks have been in Chicago for good portions of their lives, and then so many went back to Detroit or the suburbs of Detroit especially.

And they were constantly hitting me up to tell me I needed to come to Detroit.

And again, I just always wanted to go to cities where I felt it was on the up and up.

Like, we get offers for New York, LA, Miami, Vegas, but there are other offerings there and we watched the data points of what we thought was gonna pop, and Detroit was off the chart.

It was like, you know, all of the signs were there, the city was like us against everybody.

Everyone's supporting, everyone's so supportive.

I've lived there for, like, months, building and getting it ready and training and I've just fallen in love with the city.

People couldn't be kinder.

- How would you describe Filipino food and what makes it so unique as a cuisine?

- The most amazing, distinctive characteristic of Filipino food is that it's always evolving.

There's 7,641 islands in the Philippines and that has been, you know, influenced by so many different cultures and countries, whether you know it's Spain, or China, or Mexico, Japan, India, Malaysia, the US, Africa, you name it.

I think the Kamayan feast is like one of the best examples of a Filipino food experience because you're literally getting on a banana leaf lined table, sometimes we do 'em on these tables behind me, the 40 foot table of banana leaf and then all the procession, the chefs come out with all the, you know, dozen or so pieces that create this gigantic island feast.

But we also do it on a nice butcher block at your table customized with this big, of course, the foundation of the culture and the genre of food is the rice.

And then we put the crispy pata confit pork shank, my favorite, right, in the middle.

And then street food is really popular throughout Southeast Asia, especially in the Philippines.

And then so you'll have like skewers of garlic, shrimp and you know, chicken inasal and all of these, which is a great lemongrass, achiote type grilling chicken that is one of my personal favorites.

And then you have longganisa, which is the sausage that you saw in the documentary as well.

And lumpia, this Chinese inspired, lumpia Shanghai, which is this Chinese inspired Filipino egg roll with pork, shrimp, you know, vegetables.

All the things that my lola used to make for us as afterschool snacks.

It's just a feast.

And the Kamayan meal to this day is really special because you're usually having it with your friends and family.

Kamay means hand, we're eating with our hands.

And it means, from the stories that we're told, that when the day ended and the doors closed, we could go back to the ways in which our ancestors ate on the banana leaves with our hands.

And we will once again, it doesn't matter where in the world you are from, be connected through food.