Filipina chef Margarita Fores is a busy woman. In Manila, she runs a small empire of eateries — ranging from a chain of informal Italian cafes to the upscale restaurants Grace Park and Alta — and has been crisscrossing the globe since 2016, when she was named Asia's best female chef by the U.K.-based World's 50 Best Restaurants organization.

Earlier this month, Fores traveled to Japan for her first collaboration dinner event with chef Hiroyasu Kawate, of restaurant Florilege in Tokyo's Aoyama district. When I catch her for gin and tonics on her penultimate night in the Japanese capital, she has just come from a marathon session of kakigori (shaved ice flavored with sweetened syrup) sampling with Kawate at Minatoya, his favorite shop in Shibuya Ward.

"We had eight," she tells me, emphasizing the number with a flash of her expressive brown eyes. "My favorite one was the chestnut. I had no idea Japanese chestnuts were so sweet."

With only a couple of days to explore the city's food scene, Fores packed as much as possible into her gastronomic itinerary. But rather than focusing on high-end establishments, Fores, who had visited Japan three times previously, opted for a more down-to-earth experience.

"I wanted to eat like a local," she laughs. Her must-try list included ramen (Kagari and Rokurinsha Tsukemen), burgers (Henry's Burger) and pizza (Pizza Studio Tamaki).

"I was especially interested in Tokyo's pizza makers because I'd heard that many of them had studied in Italy and are now making amazing Neapolitan-style pizza," she explains.

The story has particular resonance for Fores, who fell in love with Italian cuisine while living in exile from the totalitarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos with her family in New York during the early 1980s.

"At the time, there were so many restaurants in New York serving cuisine from all over Italy. It was exciting — completely different from the Italian food I'd had before — and that's when I first thought about cooking as a career," she recalls.

Her path to becoming a chef, however, was far from conventional. She had graduated from university with a degree in accounting and worked for an investment firm in Hong Kong before relocating to New York. In in her 20s, Fores landed a job with the fashion house Valentino and frequently accompanied her socialite mother — a Studio 54 habitue who introduced the young Margarita to celebrities such as Salvador Dali — on the Manhattan party circuit.

When her grandfather passed away in 1985 and the rest of the family returned to the Philippines, Fores went to Italy on her own for four months to study the cuisine and the language. In 1987 she started a catering business in Manila and eventually opened her first restaurant, Cibo — which serves casual Italian fare such as pasta and pizza — 10 years later. Fores' company now operates 12 Cibo outlets around Manila, in addition to restaurants Lusso, Grace Park and Alta. All of Fores' cuisine is based on Italian classics, but the farm-to-table venue Grace Park fuses Italian flavors with Filipino ingredients and traditions.

At Florilege, she gave Tokyoites a taste of her Italian-inflected native cuisine. The meal began with yellowtail kinilaw (a dish similar to ceviche) with coconut milk, followed by spinach ravioli filled with Hokkaido hairy crab and taba ng talangka (baby crab fat). Guinea fowl, stuffed with leeks and lined with black truffle, was cooked over banana leaves in a palayok (a traditional earthen pot) and then covered in a sauce of wild Japanese mushrooms and Napa cabbage.

Fores will be back for another event at Florilege next year, and she is already making a list of places to try. "Next time, I'd like to go to (Italian restaurant) Cignale and many more," she says with a grin.