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"Food is a love language."
The culinary kitchen at Northwest Florida State College is the kind of room that smells like possibility.
Stainless steel gleams under bright overhead lights. Burners wait to be turned. Cutting boards stand clean and ready. On the day I visited, Chef Dee Bardo was already in motion. The smell hit me first, something rich and savory with a whisper of citrus, the kind of fragrance that makes you stop in a doorway. She moved through that kitchen the way someone does when cooking is simply breathing. Precise. Unhurried. Completely at home.
It is worth pausing on that detail. This is the same kitchen where she sat as a student not long ago.
She graduated from this program magna cum laude. Now she teaches in it.
That single fact contains an entire arc of perseverance, faith, and quiet determination. But to understand what it means, you have to go back much further than culinary school. You have to go back to a family table in Iligan City, Mindanao, where a little girl was learning the most important lesson of her life.
Where It Begins
In the Philippines, food is not a transaction. It is how families mark time, how communities hold together, how love is made visible across a table. Chef Dee grew up in that world, in a household where hospitality was not a gesture but a given, and where every milestone worth celebrating was celebrated with food.
“Food has always been a love language in my family,” she says. “Growing up, I watched meals bring people together, and I learned early that cooking wasn’t just about feeding people. It was about creating memories.”
That understanding settled into her early and stayed. Long before she ever owned a business or stood in a professional kitchen, she already knew the most important truth about cooking: it is not really about the food. It is about what the food makes possible. The gathering. The laughter. The slowing down. The sense, however brief, that everything is exactly as it should be.
What is less expected is where her story was originally headed. Dee graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science in 2003 and went straight into law school. For five years, she pursued a path that made perfect sense on paper. Lawyers were respected, successful, and the natural destination for a young woman with her ambition and intelligence.
Then life redirected her entirely. Within eight months, she had immigrated to the United States, arriving at a moment when that process still moved with relative ease, before the layers of complexity that define immigration today. She applied for her green card, built her life, and eventually became a US citizen. But she never let go of where she came from. Today, Chef Dee holds dual citizenship, Filipino and American, a choice she made deliberately. She is a woman who belongs fully to both worlds and sees no reason to choose between them.
She carried her Filipino roots with her through California, where she lived for fourteen years and where, in 2012, she began making small-bite hors d’oeuvres for friends and intimate gatherings. Nothing formal. Nothing grand. Just a woman who loved to cook, feeding people she cared about, discovering that strangers quickly became repeat clients and repeat clients quickly became something like family.
Word spreads the way it does when something is genuinely good. Not through marketing, but through memory. People remembered how they felt at her table and they told someone else.
The Decision
In 2021, Dee and her family left California for Florida. They were looking for something the Bay Area had stopped offering: slower mornings, a stronger sense of place, a life that felt more deliberate. The Emerald Coast gave them all of it.
“The Emerald Coast welcomed us with its beauty, strong sense of community, and appreciation for local businesses. I fell in love with the coastal lifestyle and the relationships we built here, and it truly became home.”
And it was here, newly rooted in Northwest Florida, that she made the decision that would define the next chapter of her life. She enrolled at Northwest Florida State College to pursue formal culinary training.
She was already a businesswoman. Already a mother. Already someone clients trusted with their most important celebrations. She did not need a degree to validate what she had spent years building. But she wanted the training. She wanted to go deeper, to refine the instincts she had always trusted and layer formal technique on top of a foundation that was already strong.
She worked. She balanced. She showed up to class and to clients and to her family all at once, the way women so often do, without making a great noise about it. And when it was over, she graduated with an Associate of Science in Culinary Arts, magna cum laude.
“It represented years of perseverance. It proved to me that it’s never too late to chase your dreams, and that hard work, faith, and determination can open doors at any stage of life.”
There is no performance in the way she says it. Just a woman who knows what something cost her, and what it was worth.
Her lead instructor, Chef Tim Yeabower, watched her move through the program differently than most students. His assessment is direct and unvarnished.
“She came in, she already had everything she needed to do it, the energy, the drive, the passion, and then it was just the way she learned day one compared to the rest of the class. She learned ten times the amount because she was always just, what’s next? What’s next?”
The college recognized what they had. Not long after graduation, they asked her to come back. This time, not as a student, but as a member of the culinary team. Today Chef Dee works alongside Chef Tim Yeabower on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, supporting sixteen students across two groups, bringing her own culinary perspective into a classroom where she once sat taking notes. Chef Yeabower is working toward bringing her on as an adjunct professor, a role she is already growing into naturally.
“It was a privilege and an honor. He had faith in me. He saw my talent, my ability, my perseverance. And I am so grateful to be part of this.”
It is the kind of full-circle moment that does not happen by accident. It happens because someone showed up, did the work, and left an impression that could not be ignored.
What She Builds
Ask Chef Dee to describe her culinary style, and she will tell you: elevated comfort with global influences. Filipino-American fusion at the center, with threads of Mediterranean, Asian, Italian, and Southern woven through, depending on the client, the occasion, the season, and the story she is being asked to help tell.
“After two years in the program, I learned so many cuisines,” she says. “I realized I could cook so many different styles. So I put it all together. An elevated international comfort. That is what I bring to every event.
But the style is almost secondary to the approach.
Every menu at Ate Dee’s Kitchen is customized. Every detail is considered. Every guest, in Chef Dee’s words, is treated like family. She is not delivering a package. She is participating in a moment that matters to someone, and she takes that seriously. She even brings culinary students from the college onto her events, giving them real-world experience while building a team that understands her standards from the inside out.
Her Sous Chef for the catering business, Tanner, embodies that same spirit. He walked away from a steady career in insurance because the work lacked purpose, started from the bottom washing dishes at Café Destin, and worked his way up over five years through sheer determination. He eventually moved into management and earned his own culinary degree. The business Chef Dee has built is one where that kind of story is not unusual. It is, in fact, the point.
The spread she prepared during our visit told that story without words. Panko-crusted crab cakes plated two ways, one with a classic lemon caper butter sauce and charred lime, another crowned with sriracha mayo and nestled in pea shoots. Brisket lumpia, golden and crackling, their filling of slow-braised beef and roasted red pepper visible where they were cut open. Fried plantain cups topped with fresh pico de gallo, a dish that somehow manages to feel simultaneously Filipino, Southern, and entirely her own. And then there is her signature: the crispy shredded egg roll wrapper bites that disappear at every event she caters, lined up on black slate with sauce drizzled in long strokes beside them, a recipe she keeps deliberately secret.
Every plate looked like it belonged in a magazine.
Every bite tasted like someone had been thinking about you specifically when they made it.
The reviews her clients leave behind read less like ratings and more like thank-you notes.
A bride named Rebekah traveled from St. Louis to get married in Navarre and hired Chef Dee without ever tasting her food. “From the very beginning,” she wrote afterward, “Dee was someone I knew I could trust. It was clear that her faith in God and love for others shine through in everything she does.” She described the meal as one of the best she and her husband had ever eaten, and she described Chef Dee as someone she was forever grateful for.
The Crestview Fire Department left her five stars.
A group of women celebrating a bachelorette party on the Gulf called her meal the highlight of the entire trip.
A family that hired her for a last-minute dinner while moving into the area came back raving.
This is what a reputation built on substance looks like. Not a single viral moment, but dozens of quiet ones. Hundreds of tables. Thousands of bites. A community that found her and kept coming back.
What Stays WitH Her
When you ask Chef Dee about the moments that have meant the most, she does not reach for the grandest ones. She reaches for the truest ones.
“Seeing families gathered around the table, celebrating milestones, laughing, and creating memories reminds me why I do what I do,” she says. “Those moments are priceless.”
There is something in the simplicity of that answer that tells you everything. She is not motivated by accolades, though she has earned them. She is not chasing recognition, though it finds her. She is motivated by the thing she understood as a little girl in Iligan City, watching her family cook: that food, at its best, is not about the plate. It is about the people around it.
“If you don’t have that heart, you can’t do what you do.”
“Serving the Emerald Coast is both a privilege and an honor,” she adds. “This community has embraced my family and my business, and I love being part of the celebrations that make this area so special.”
She means it. You can tell because she says it without flourish, the way people speak about things that are simply, genuinely true.
What Stays WitH Her
When you ask Chef Dee about the moments that have meant the most, she does not reach for the grandest ones. She reaches for the truest ones.
“Seeing families gathered around the table, celebrating milestones, laughing, and creating memories reminds me why I do what I do,” she says. “Those moments are priceless.”
There is something in the simplicity of that answer that tells you everything. She is not motivated by accolades, though she has earned them. She is not chasing recognition, though it finds her. She is motivated by the thing she understood as a little girl in Iligan City, watching her family cook: that food, at its best, is not about the plate. It is about the people around it.
“If you don’t have that heart, you can’t do what you do.”
“Serving the Emerald Coast is both a privilege and an honor,” she adds. “This community has embraced my family and my business, and I love being part of the celebrations that make this area so special.”
She means it. You can tell because she says it without flourish, the way people speak about things that are simply, genuinely true.
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