Yasmin Tayag, 38: James Beard Award winner
With so much pride and excitement, I cannot help but be the town crier to announce yet another milestone for Filipinos all over the world — a Filipino-American, a niece at that, carrying my surname, won the prestigious James Beard Foundation Media Award for Health and Wellness. This year’s ceremonies took place on Saturday, June 13, at the Art Institute of Chicago. It included winners in the Book Awards, Broadcast Media Awards, and Journalism Awards.
I received the news of her winning the “Oscars of the Culinary World” almost at the time of its announcement, through a surprise video call from a mutual friend, Lakhi Siap.
“Look who’s with me here in Chicago,” he said, panning his phone to unexpectedly show New York-based Yasmin’s familiar face.
“She’s about to receive the James Beard award!” he said. “OMG!!!” was all I could mutter.
I had featured Yasmin’s narrative of her dad’s “vinegary adobo” in my Ultimate Filipino Adobo book. In fact, she came to the book launch held at the Philippine Center in New York some three years ago.
The tartness of my dad’s unabashedly vinegary chicken-pork adobo was a flash of neon in the dark of winter nights, reminding us of who we were
Yasmin was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. She’s the only child of my first cousin Ramon “Mon” Tayag. Mon and his two siblings grew up in San Juan City, Metro Manila, and were far removed from their father Enrique’s Kapampangan heritage (Enrique was my father’s youngest sibling of nine). Food at the San Juan household, I could only assume, was basically Tagalog, meaning they like most everything intensely sour, especially when it comes to sinigang, adobo, and dinuguan. This was the palate Mon brought with him when he migrated to Canada in the 1980s.
“Growing up in Toronto was pleasantly unexciting. Home was a tiny townhouse with a handsome maple tree in front and a wide, flat field that spread out behind it. In the winters, thick blankets of snow descended on the field, tucking it into a deep, white sleep that lasted nearly half the year. Gazing out the window during these frozen months, my dad’s bright, unabashedly vinegary chicken-pork adobo became more than just dinner.
“I loved Canada and its overwhelming sense of peace, but I often craved excitement. The tartness of that adobo was a flash of neon in the featureless dark of those winter nights, reminding us of who we were despite our monochrome surroundings: proud immigrants from a vibrant motherland bursting with flamboyant smells and flavors.
“My dad found a way to evoke the Philippines with the most generic of ingredients from Canadian supermarkets… When he did, he could transform our chilly kitchen into a fiesta for our town—population: three.
“When I left home to take my master’s in New York, my worried parents called every night to ask what, and how, I was eating. My dad, despite being a terrific cook and voracious eater, never walked me through the steps of his dishes because he was so intent on getting dinner on the table, so he assumed I didn’t know how to feed myself. Good thing I had a knack for observation. One night, when they asked what I had for dinner, I told them I had made chicken-pork adobo.
“‘You know how to make adobo?’” they asked.
“‘How could I not?’” I replied.”
You can take this girl out of the Philippines, but you can’t take the Filipino—or should I say, the Kapampangan—out of her.
Yasmin received a degree in human biology and English literature at the University of Toronto, then did her master’s in Biology at New York University after a stint in a developmental genetics lab.
As a professional writer, she was a contributor to several scientific journals. Before joining The Atlantic as a staff writer in 2021, she was the science editor at OneZero, Future Human, and Inverse. Her writing has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bon Appétit, and other publications. At The Atlantic, where she is presently a staff writer, Yasmin writes about science and the future of food.
At home, she is a part-time cook and co-founder of Greenhills Diner, a Filipino food pop-up. She lives in New York City with her husband Michael Salgarolo and their three-year-old son Jaime Enrique, who, by the way, was gobbling up kamote and arugula salad at age two. (Another Tayag with a big appetite in the making.)
