Restauranteur Billy Dec Explores His Filipino Heritage in the PBS Documentary “Food Roots”

When our elders pass away, too often their recipes die with them. In recent years, this reality really began sinking in for actor and restaurateur Billy Dec. So Dec, the son of a white father and Filipina mother, decided to travel to the Philippines to find his last living maternal elders and learn his ancestral recipes. He brought along a film crew, and the result is the new PBS documentary Food Roots.We met up with Dec at Sunda Tampa, the Southeast Asian restaurant he owns in Tampa’s Midtown district. In this conversation, he discusses what his journey taught him about himself, his struggle to fit in as a “Waisian” kid growing up in Chicago and the rising popularity of Filipino cuisine.