Underneath a bright yellow awning at the corner of Juneau’s 2nd and Main Streets, a stirring crowd has begun to grow. It’s a quarter hour until the local dining favorite, In Bocca al Lupo, opens. But on this drizzling October evening, it’s not an ordinary day for the restaurant’s kitchen. Head chef Rachel Carrillo Barril is busy preparing her debut solo dinner, a celebration of her heritage during Filipino American History Month.

Just a few months over two years ago, Carrillo Barril was promoted to chef de cuisine of In Bocca al Lupo. She’s cooked alongside Beau Schooler, the James Beard-nominated chef who owns In Bocca al Lupo, for around 12 years. While Carrillo Barril is the creative behind countless of the restaurant’s specials, this dinner—five dishes combining Filipino, Italian, and Alaskan culinary influences—is the first she’s organized independently with In Bocca al Lupo.

“Filipino cuisine is my favorite to cook,” Carrillo Barril says. “I wanted to introduce people to Filipino foods they’re not familiar with, or in ways they haven’t tried before by incorporating different techniques.”

ADOBO

Outside of the kitchen, diners huddle around communal tables, chatting about the next dish. AnaVera Carrillo Morato (opposite) carries this course—a savory adobo duck confit laid over a bed of mashed butter Yukon gold potatoes—out to diners on a large serving tray.

Adobo refers to a popular Filipino dish with innumerable variations, and the version Carrillo Barril grew up with included potatoes braised in sauce. Paired with a toasty pool of adobo gravy, the potatoes remind guests of a Thanksgiving meal. The center bird, however, is not roasted like a turkey. Adobo isn’t simply a food—it’s a cooking method using vinegar, salt, and often soy sauce to preserve and flavor a meat. Carrillo Barril combined this Filipino preservation process with a French one, confit, to cook the duck leg. A chicharron crumble, made from chicken skins, tops and garnishes the dish.

PANDESAL

In the kitchen, Christine Southall sprinkles the delicate leaves from a malunggay tree onto the dinner’s first course. When paired with the falling leaves outside, it’s easy to associate the golden bread loaves with the season of fall. The first dish, called malunggay pandesal, is a pillowy yeast bread Carrillo Barril enjoyed during her last visit to the Philippines. There’s a comforting sensation when you bite into a roll— the bread is bouncy yet sweet, enlivened with the floral flavor of freshly brewed tea. That flavor, Carrillo Barril explains, comes from the dried malunggay leaves mixed into the dough. It’s common practice in the Philippines to add malunggay to the bread for nutrition, but Carrillo Barril’s pandesal borrows techniques from a milk bread recipe to create a tender vessel for the flavor. As the bread comes out of the oven, Christina Pastore plates the dish.

PANCIT MOLO

Carrillo Barril’s second course is a nontraditional take on a dish called pancit Molo. It’s a cozy dumpling soup from Iloilo City’s Molo district that’s inspired by the wontons Chinese settlers brought to the region. As she rolls out extra dough spliced with herbs and safflower, Carrillo Barril explains how the wonton wrappers for pancit Molo are traditionally much smaller than what she’s made. Her training in Italian cuisine inspired her to go larger. Each silky handkerchief, called fazzoletti, is used either as a dumpling wrapper or a blanket that’s spread across the dish’s ingredients. The broth, too, isn’t what’s typical for pancit Molo. It’s closer to chicken tinola, a mellow but rich gingery soup that’s another comfort dish in the Philippines. Once the dumplings, herbs, and fazzoletti are attentively placed in a bowl, a cook pours the steaming broth like a warm winter bath for the dumplings.

INASAL

Smoke curls from the applewood coals inside the In Bocca al Lupo oven, roasting rows of marinated salmon wings basted in annatto oil. This style of roasting is called “inasal” in the Ilonggo language, and it’s how pork, chicken, and beef are made into some of the varieties of Filipino barbecue you’d find at a street stall. For the dinner’s third course, Carrillo Barril replaced these barbecue meats with an offcut of Alaska’s favorite fish. She doesn’t like when an ingredient goes to waste, and her salmon wing inasal highlights the fatty content from the wings that other chefs dismiss. The fish is steeped in a sawsawan, or dipping sauce, made from elderflower vinegar, citrus, and spices. Just as you would splash sawsawan over your street barbecue, the sauce pierces through the salmon’s rich oils for an unexpected balance. Meanwhile, fresh vegetables and watermelon atchara add a light crunch—contrasting the salmon’s chewy texture.

BIKO

Dale Beard showers sweetened matcha powder onto the dinner’s last course. Carrillo Barril chose the dessert, a sweet coconut rice cake called biko, because of her grandmother. While most in her family can cook, Carrillo Barril said, her grandmother couldn’t. But during visits, her grandmother would make biko for her—one of few recipes she could make. Next to the sticky rice, a creamy banana semifreddo also sits on the bottom of the bowl. Arranged above are sesame tuile pyramids, which break into shards with the first spoon dig.

First published in the Spring 2025 issue of Edible Alaska.