Chef Jane Pepito
Paris, France
Hello! I’m Jane Pepito
I work at the intersection of flavor, culture, and lived experience, always in motion, but never unmoored.
A major part of life has been shaped by oceans, kitchens, and long conversations across borders. From megayachts to spice markets, I have spent years observing how food behaves under pressure, how it travels, adapts, and quietly anchors people to place, memory, and rhythm.
I design culinary systems for dynamic environments, develop wellness-driven menus for modern living, and study the anthropology of flavor, the way ingredients, rituals, and ideas move through cultures and shape identity over time.
My work lives where curiosity meets discipline, where creativity is guided by precision, and where restraint matters as much as expression. I believe mastery is not a fixed point but a practice, refined through repetition, attention, and the willingness to evolve.
Whether I am building a culinary framework, writing about spice heritage, or moving through another landscape, my focus is the same: distilling meaning from experience and translating it into something coherent, nourishing, and enduring.
Whether I’m designing a culinary framework, writing about spice heritage, or trekking to the next island, my work is about distilling meaning from experience, and turning it into something others can taste, learn from, or be inspired by.
Welcome to Island Chef Kitchen, a living journal of taste, place, and the quiet structures that allow both beauty and continuity to exist.
Documenting food, culture, and internal culinary operations across private, high-trust environments.
about the island chef kitchen
Island Chef Kitchen did not begin with a grand plan. It started with a restless curiosity, a notebook, and a dream too stubborn to stay quiet.
This space is my personal atlas of flavor, a working journal of cuisines, cultures, and food systems shaped by travel across continents and oceans. It traces a path from my island roots in Cebu, Philippines, and through the seas, and the ancient Spice Route, where food has always been more than sustenance. It has been trade, diplomacy, medicine, ritual, and survival.
Here, I document an ongoing legacy project, a Spice Route–inspired cookbook woven with recipes, memories, and lived observation. The stories behind ingredients matter. They reveal how cultures adapt, how tastes migrate, and how continuity is preserved under changing conditions.
People often ask: Why spices? Why the Spice Route?
Because it is where flavor, history, and human ingenuity converge. Spices connect fishermen to merchants, kitchens to climates, and private tables to global movement. They carry evidence of restraint, excess, resilience, and exchange.
I have always been drawn to maps, crossings, and the invisible threads that hold systems together. That curiosity now lives in how I approach food. I am driven to explore how it travels, how flavors evolve, how it is sourced, how it is prepared, how it quietly shapes wellbeing and rhythm in daily life, and how cultures intertwine through something as elemental as taste.
Island Chef Kitchen is not an archive of the past. It is a living record of taste in motion. A place where cooking is both craft and compass, and where simplicity, discipline, and pleasure coexist. I want to make the past edible, the present curious, and the act of cooking a journey worth savoring.
This is a space for the curious, the well-travelled, teh attentive, and the passionate, for those who find wonder in the scent of spice, the warmth of a shared meal, and the adventure of learning something new. For those who understand that behind every memorable meal is an unseen structure, and that knowing the story behind our food makes every bite not just richer, but steadier.
Welcome aboard. Let us follow the winds, taste the world, and keep discovering how flavor connects us all.
recipes
This site is about discovering a casual attitude toward cooking, making a new and informal approach to island flavours and “Spice Route” cuisines. Most recipes highlight herbs and spices, produce endemic to a place, that are weaved through stories of adventures.
meet jane
Jane Pepito is a true city girl with love for island life, a culinary globetrotter with an appetite for discovery and a passion for fresh, flavourful cuisine. Her career spans commercial and private cheffing, restaurant consulting, and food writing, and today she travels the world as Head Chef aboard private luxury superyachts.
Raised in Manila, Jane’s love for food began at home. Her mother and grandmother passed down Filipino-Spanish and Indian dishes rich in tradition, while her father, an international airline pilot, introduced her to global flavours from his travels. That early immersion in diverse cuisines ignited a lifelong fascination with how food connects cultures.
After a successful corporate marketing career in Manila, Jane traded the city skyline for island life in Cebu. In 2007, she founded Midori Bento Catering, a venture that marked the beginning of her culinary path. Her curiosity about wellness and sustainable food systems led her to study Integrative Nutrition at IIN, as well as Culinary Arts at both the International School for Culinary Arts and Hotel Management (ISCAHM) and Culinary Solutions Australia International, graduating with high honors.
Her career took her to Los Angeles, where she worked as a freelance private chef for VIP clients across Southern California. Travels throughout Europe, the UAE, Morocco, Tanzania, and Southeast Asia expanded her culinary knowledge and deepened her respect for local ingredients and global techniques.
In 2015, Jane returned to the Philippines as Executive Chef of The Clove on the Quay at the Cebu Yacht Club and later as Corporate Chef for La Vie Parisienne and La Vie in the Sky.
Her superyacht career began in 2019 aboard the world’s largest private luxury trimaran, an 86-meter motor yacht, where she quickly rose through the ranks. By 2022, she became Head Chef of the Research Vessel OceanXplorer, the world’s most advanced ocean research vessel, and in 2023, she took command as Head Chef of a 95-meter private motor yacht. Her achievements made her the first Filipina chef to helm the galley of 80-meter+ private superyachts, a milestone that represents both mastery and pioneering spirit.
Today, Jane continues to navigate the world’s oceans, crafting dishes that celebrate heritage, innovation, and the artistry of ingredient-driven cuisine. Each voyage adds to her evolving narrative — one where food is not just sustenance, but story, memory, and connection.