Kasama: flying the flag, hype, and that truffle croissant

We caught up with Kasama’s Tim Flores and Genie Kwon, as they brought their brand of Filipino fine dining to Europe.

It’s a sweltering April day in Madrid and I am marching up and down a busy Salamanca street looking for a door. Eventually, I see it: a small sticker next to a buzzer that says ‘Kasama In Residence’. I’m buzzed in, with those around me at street level going about their daily business probably unaware that I’m about to have lunch cooked for me by potentially Chicago’s hottest restaurant team (and by team, I mean it, as we’ll see), who are popping up in Europe for just a few days. 

I feel sorry for those people because more than likely, none or at least very, very few (on account of the restaurant being in Chicago) have tried Kasama’s signature croissant, which is stuffed with truffled délice de Bourgogne cheese, drizzled with honey, and showered with fresh truffle. I enjoy a mini version of the pastry that people queue hours for in Chicago—amongst other things—as the first dessert in a multi-course Filipino-inspired menu at In Residence that doesn’t put a step wrong. It’s a deeply delicious and decadent treat that leads an emotional fellow diner to stand up and hug Genie Kwon, the pastry chef who along with chef husband Tim Flores is the core of Kasama. And this is coming from someone (me), who isn’t a huge truffle fan (deal with it, reader).

Let’s step back a bit. Kasama opened in 2020 and is a bakery during the day and a fine dining restaurant serving an elevated Filipino tasting menu at night. You may have been there without being there—it features briefly in season two of The Bear, during Sydney's food tour of Chicago. They have a Michelin star and a James Beard Award. Kwon, who grew up in New Orleans, and Flores, a Chicago native of Filipino descent, met in Chicago at GT Fish & Oyster and helped to open Noah Sandoval’s Oriole. Flores’ menu is inspired by nostalgia, his mom’s cooking when he was growing up. But his mom wasn’t a fine-dining chef.

“When we decided we were going to open a Filipino restaurant and modernize and elevate the cuisine, it was extremely difficult for me to conceptualize [the] food because I had never seen it before,” says Flores. “I had never seen fine-dining Filipino food versus rustic French cuisine and fine dining, or Japanese, or Italian. I never had a Filipino tasting menu and I was like, ‘How do I not serve this stew with a big bowl of rice’? And so, we took rice out of the menu—mostly, we have a couple of dishes with it. One of the things that we try to stay true to is keeping the flavors authentic to the dish, just because it doesn't make sense for us to go off the map and then make it taste like something different, when most people have never even had it before.”

Flores and Kwon say they “don't do anything in the restaurant that doesn't make sense” for not only them but their entire team. It’s not always a choice. Originally the plan for Kasama was a bakery by day and a more casual, higher volume restaurant by night, serving an à la carte menu. But pandemic pressures put paid to that—reduced covers and a tasting menu the only way to keep the business going and retain staff.

“A tasting menu makes sense financially for us. We have two services, breakfast and lunch and then dinner that come out of the same kitchen. So, I'll never have this process that takes the cooks from 9am until when we start service because we don't have the room for it. I worked fine dining and I would show up at eight, nine in the morning and I don't want my cooks to do that and that depends on my menu,” says Flores.

The bakery is a “passion project” according to Kwon, “my ability to selfishly want to provide pastries at all times of day,” she says. But the team appreciates every single person who takes the time to queue for a taste of that truffle croissant, or the foie gras Danish (!) – "I'm more trained in French-American technique," says Kwon or a breakfast sandwich, and hot drinks made with Filipino ingredients like ube or calmansi, they say.

“It’s such a hard thing because you want to make as many people happy as possible. So we definitely reiterate that to our team every day: people are choosing to come here. They're literally choosing to spend their entire day with us. I think that [we have] such an incredible team because they're able to empathize with every single person that comes in,” says Kwon.

A considerable number of that team travel to Madrid—14 (Kasamians?) are in Spain in total, back and front of house. The tasting menu too is pretty much transported bite for bite. “A lot of vinegar, a lot of acid in the food as a preservative. Lots of garlic,” says Flores when I ask him to describe the essential characteristics of Filipino food. They’re all present in Kasama’s signature adobo, a dish, classically, of soy sauce, vinegar, and garlic, to which they add maitake mushroom, scallop conserva and “some nice Spanish olive oil.”

“Rather than thinking of it like other Southeast Asian cuisines, to me, [Filipino food] reminds me, more of Mexican or Puerto Rican or Cuban cuisine, because you have that island culture with the Spanish influence,” says Flores.

Kare-kare, a traditional stew that originated in the Pampanga region, where Flores’ paternal family is from and which defines much of his cooking—Filipino cuisine is deeply regional—features lamb belly and a bagoong (fermented fish condiment) XO, and is another standout dish.

Flores admits that the country’s cuisine as a whole is having a moment in the US. Some would even call it trendy. “It’s a generational thing, a lot of chefs that are around my age, it's sort of that time, they’re starting to open their own restaurants and take over,” he says.

And the approval of the Filipino community in Chicago and beyond is of course welcomed by Flores and Kwon. So far, the response has been, well, emotional.

“It’s kind of crazy that we have people that come into dinner and they start crying because they're so nostalgic for their childhood memories,” says Kwon.

“There's this competitive nature with Filipinos. You always hear somebody say, ‘Well oh it's pretty good but it's not as good as my mom's’” adds Flores. “I think this is due to just the diversity in the cuisine itself, not everybody's food is the same. And it's always the hardest to please somebody who's had the food before. But the feedback and the support has been crazy. We have people flying in from the Philippines to come eat Filipino food in Chicago, which is absurd. It's like going to the Philippines to go eat at a Chicago-style pizza place. When people are recognized, especially internationally, the Filipino community, really, really loves seeing them.”