Genie Kwon and Tim Flores just wanted a neighborhood place, where people could come in for their morning coffee and a pastry. They thought dinner would drive the business, but decidedly not a finer-dining tasting menu.
“The last year and a half had different plans for us,” Kwon said.
“It used to be a lot more simple,” Flores said.
Previously, they were the pastry chef and chef de cuisine, respectively, at the Michelin two-star restaurant Oriole.
Now, their chosen titles are different.
“We’re both chef-owners,” Kwon said.
“We’re equal partners in this whole thing and help each other with every aspect of the restaurant,” Flores said. “That’s a purposeful thing, rather than pastry or savory or whatever.”
That “whole thing” is Kasama in the East Ukrainian Village neighborhood.
“The name Kasama in Tagalog means together or companion or included,” said Flores, who is Filipino American Chicagoan. “So that’s very meaningful for what we’re doing, which changed a ton.”
Kasama is not just the epicenter of modern Filipino food in Chicago right now. The bakery and cafe, with a stunning new contemporary tasting menu dinner, does indeed resonate with echoes of the Philippines. The experience as a whole, however, sets an extraordinary standard, which honors the culture while evolving beyond it into one of the best restaurants in the world right now.
To be clear, I’m not talking about expensive chairs and floral arrangements. Inside their dark gray building, you’ll find rustic wood floors, pale gray banquettes and the quiet luxury of lush houseplants, handmade ceramics and impeccable service.
Nowhere else could you start your day with a perfectly pulled coconut cortadito ($5) and what’s become their signature ube and huckleberry Basque cake ($6). What they’ve called a “no bull—-” breakfast sandwich ($9) stuffs house-made longganisa, egg souffle, melted American cheese sandwich and an extra-crispy hash brown ($2) in a soft potato roll.
A playfully redefining lunch translates a Chicago-style Italian beef into the combo sandwich ($14) with a fatty longganisa sausage smothered with tender slices of pork adobo and giardiniera. The Reggie Flores ($5.50) remixes an Arnold Palmer with bracing calamansi lemonade and hibiscus tea from Rare Tea Cellar, spiked with rum ($6) or your choice of spirit.
They opened July 29, 2020, with takeout-only breakfast and lunch. They eventually added counter-service dinner.
“It was summer so we had the patio,” Kwon said. “But we served everything in takeout boxes.”
They met with ceramist David Kim from DTK Ceramics on a number of occasions. Kim is Korean American, as is Kwon. They curated and designed dishware, but put those plans on hold and switched to making everything to-go as a COVID-19 precaution.
“Genie or I would run back and clear the table and sanitize it,” Flores said. “But there was no actual service on the patio at all other than taking food out.”
They started their new 13-course tasting menu dinner ($185) Nov. 18 this year, much to their past selves’ surprise.
“After we left fine dining, we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s open a tasting menu restaurant, because that’s where we come from and that’s what we know,'” Kwon said.
The more they thought about it, though, the more adamant they were about not doing a tasting menu, because they just wanted to be a neighborhood restaurant.
“We love tasting menus,” Flores said. “We like cooking that way. But we also don’t go to those restaurants very often. That’s the truth.”
Their plans changed, because the world changed. Rising costs of everything were coupled with a need to pay employees properly and to pay them as much as they could, while still making ends meet.
“We know that we can have a higher price point,” Flores said. “We know that we can have less staff. We know that we can do less people per night if capacity gets pulled back in Chicago, if anything happens this winter with other variants.”
Their reluctantly heroic tasting menu surpasses so many others, not just in the city, but some of the best around the world I’ve tasted and helped cook. The regular and vegetarian tasting menus were both so fantastic, I had to restrain myself from fist pumping the air with affirmation.
Early in the omnivorous meal, the nilaga course, with silky A5 Wagyu beef, ribbons of cabbage, and pearlescent short grain rice with Wagyu broth on the side, embraces its origins while transcending the story.
“Nilaga soup is a really basic beef shank, potatoes and cabbage soup,” Flores said. “There are some onions in there, but no other seasoning other than salt.”
Just about every culture has its own variation: Korean seolleongtang, Chinese oxtail soup.
“Growing up, I didn’t really enjoy that soup too much,” Flores added. “It was just kind of a plain soup you ate. But I remember my dad taking the marrow that was left in the broth, mixing it in with his rice and with the cabbage, then eating that with some of the broth on the side.”
Flores learned to love the dish as he became an adult.
“Turning that dish into something that people are enjoying on a 13-course tasting menu — something that reminds me of my mom’s cooking and things that my dad ate, that’s just homey and comforting — is just so satisfying,” he said.
The vegetarian menu was so creative, I wondered if some of the dishes still had as much of a hold in Filipino food, or leaned more uniquely creative to Kasama.
“Our first instinct is to substitute,” Kwon said of developing the vegetarian courses. “That’s what works the best for some courses.”
The vegetarian kare-kare, for instance, swaps lamb belly with halloumi, served with a round of paratha flatbread to swipe through a soft quenelle of defining peanut sauce.
“But then something like the sinigang was a little bit more difficult,” Flores said of the Filipino sour stew served a few courses later. “That’s why we changed it to the coconut milk and squash dish.”
A squash and long bean pinakbet, an earthy, Indigenous Filipino vegetable stew, remarkably replaced a quivering smoked roe-garnished salmon fillet on the nonvegetarian menu.
Alongside the beautiful tasting menu, beverage director Josh Daws’ drink pairings ($95) went far beyond wine. His nonalcoholic pairing ($35) was so breathtaking and such a bargain that it was intoxicating. The spirit-free ube gin fizz that followed the 10 savory courses and preceded three desserts looked like a milkshake, but sipped like a tart, effervescent cocktail, much needed as a palate cleanser.
A mini truffle croissant followed, bridging savory to sweet, and Filipino-inspired dishes to the French-inspired interlude. They shower black truffle tableside on buttery, honey-kissed layers filled with Délice de Bourgogne cheese.
“There’s always that question of authenticity and where we want to take it and how it might be perceived,” Kwon said. “And the goal was not to price people out of enjoying this food.”
Unfortunately the stigma persists that some Asian cuisine should remain cheap. Kasama upends that notion with ease.
“Filipino food is not just rice and a stew, or lumpia and pancit,” Flores said.
His re-imagined pancit shrouds black squid ink noodles in jamón, unlike any I’ve experienced, even on a culinary trade mission to the Philippines. The crisp lumpia wrapped in rice paper and herbs triggered a taste memory of my elegant Shanghainese aunts teaching me how to eat spring rolls, which moved me to tears.
Somehow Kasama has reached these extraordinary heights while constantly planning for the next phase of the pandemic.
“It weighs on us every day,” Kwon said. They require reservations and proof of vaccination or a negative test from each person. As of this moment, they’ve reverted daytime service to takeout only. “We’re taking all the precautions we can take,” Flores said.
Kasama deserves more than all the stars. Not just for the tasting menus or pastries or longganisa sandwiches or mushroom adobo, offered by day with garlic rice ($16) and by night as a maitake frond with mussel emulsion.
Not even for the chocolate salted caramel tart ($8), which they say serves one to two people, but which I wolfed down alone after a contact lost their senses of smell and taste. If I lost mine to COVID-19, I wanted that tart as my lasting taste memory.
They deserve the world for devoting their world to heroic humility, deliciousness and triumph, whether it’s served in a paper box or handmade bowl.
Kasama
1001 N. Winchester Ave.
773-697-3790
Open: Wednesday to Sunday, breakfast and lunch, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Thursday to Sunday, dinner 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Prices: Breakfast and lunch, $3 (chocolate chip cookie) to $16 (mushroom adobo); dinner, $35 (six-drink nonalcoholic pairing) to $185 (13-course tasting menu)
Noise: Conversation-friendly
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible with restrooms on single level
Tribune rating: Four stars, outstanding
Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.
Clarification: Kasama is in the East Ukrainian Village neighborhood.
