Technically, Chicago doesn’t have a Filipino neighborhood. But Julius Tacadena, the chef and owner of Kanin, thinks a gastronomic Little Manila could be brewing in a small pocket in and around Ravenswood, where he opened his buzzy Filipino-Hawaiian bodega in March.
The sunny Kanin storefront sits next door to Side Practice Coffee, a Filipino cafe and startup incubator that helped launch it. This coffee shop is also where the idea percolated for Del Sur, Justin Lerias’ three-month-old creative Filipino-Midwestern pastry shop a few blocks south on Damen Avenue, known for regular lines down the block.
“This little stretch, from our corner at Foster and Damen down to where Boonie’s [Filipino Restaurant] is at, over to Bayan Ko and up to Del Sur, it could be Little Manila,” Tacadena said. “We have so many people now doing this crawl, right? Where they start their day at Del Sur in that massive line and end their day getting a cup of coffee and musubi [nori-wrapped Hawaiian rice snack] with us.”
That some of the city’s buzziest, most exciting Filipino-inspired cooking all comes from a square-mile stretch of Chicago’s North Side can be attributed in part to real estate. Indie operators are seeking more affordable areas of neighborhoods like Ravenswood and Pilsen, where Filipino-Mexican-influenced Novel Pizza Cafe opened last summer, though it was already famous for its longanisa- and giardiniera-topped tavern pies.
It’s no wonder that Filipino cooking, which masterfully tightrope-walks sweet, savory and sour flavors, is getting its due here — lately taking up such inventive forms as Boonie’s sticky, sauced pork belly “al pastor,” Del Sur’s banana-scented Turon Danish and Kanin’s tempura shrimp musubi dusted with tangy, savory sinigang powder. But one could reasonably argue that there’s another force behind the current boost of fine Filipino dining, and that’s Francis Almeda, who has had a major hand in the current entrepreneurial burst.
The graphic designer-turned-cafe owner has opened or partnered on four Filipino-influenced food businesses since 2020 — all of which have been self-funded, a few with help from grants and Small Business Administration loans. Almeda began with Side Practice, where his ube lattes and Manila matchas with macadamia milk relentlessly flow as if from purple and green taps. The chefs of Kanin, Del Sur and Novel Pizza all popped up at Almeda’s cafe before debuting standalone locations over the past year.
They’re all riding a veritable tidal wave of demand for Filipino food, which has surged nationally over the past decade. Thanks largely to Gen Z, that demand is up by 50 percent over the past year alone, according to AI-based research from consumer insights platform Tastewise.
“There’s been a lot of attention not only on me and on our shops but on Filipino food and culture overall,” Almeda said. “I’m gonna ride that wave. Maybe it won’t be here for long. I’m trying to go as far as we can with it while I have this energy and drive — take advantage and keep pushing for the culture.”
Early-stage incubators such as Side Practice and The Hatchery in East Garfield Park have become pivotal on-ramps for indie food startups pinched by the soaring costs of food and real estate.
Laying groundwork
The Philippines comprise 7,000 islands that represent a confluence of cultures, including Chinese, Spanish and American, owing to colonization, trade and occupation, which melded with indigenous techniques and flavors. While Chicago is home to the seventh-largest Filipino population in the U.S., the country’s cuisine hasn’t historically been broadly represented, save for places such as Ruby’s Fast Food, Uncle Mike’s Place and Seafood City, the sprawling Filipino supermarket and prepared foods store that’s also acted as a cultural hub.
“There’d be staples like Isla Pilipina [which closed in 2020] and Ruby’s, but overall, there weren’t really places you could sit down and eat Filipino food,” said Almeda, who grew up in Lincoln Square.
For many Filipino Americans in Chicago, the trauma of cultural suppression runs deep. Tacadena, who spent his formative years in Hawaii, grew accustomed to the melting pot of influences on Kauai. When his family moved back to Chicago in 2005, he and his younger sisters suddenly wished their mom packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in their lunches.
“Never once in my life in Hawaii did I have to think about what I was eating,” Tacadena said. “When I moved here to Chicago, my first week of school I was getting looks: ‘Oh, what is that? What are you eating? Your food stinks.’ ”
By the late 2010s, the tide was shifting. Filipino American (Fil-Am) chef Lawrence Letrero was probably a decade into his fine-dining cooking career when he grew tired of “executing everyone’s vision but mine,” he said. He knew that Filipino cooking was already popping off in other cities around the country. “It was time for Filipino cuisine and culture to finally make some real noise in Chicago,” he said.
In 2018, he and his wife — owner and general manager Raquel Quadreny — opened the boundary-pushing Cuban-Filipino restaurant Bayan Ko. It quickly became as famous for the challenge of snagging a table as its crackly lumpia, crispy fried lechon (pork belly) with garlic mojo and salty-sweet shaved ice halo-halo made with purple yams. That same year, Manila-born Kathy Vega Hardy debuted A Taste of the Philippines at the French Market, serving pancit and longaniza scotch eggs. (Hardy has since opened a standalone location in Jefferson Park.)
Gastronomic progress aside, the early days of the pandemic felt like a huge backward leap for many in Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities in Chicago, fueled by a series of attacks on Asian Americans early during COVID lockdown. This proved something of a breaking point for chef Joseph Fontelera, who’d already grown untenably frustrated that he’d ignored the food of his upbringing for his entire fine-dining career.
“I was p—d off at myself and the global situation,” said Fontelera, who was the executive chef of West Town sushi spot Arami at the time (which has since closed). “I was like, ‘Why am I making sushi?’ But OK, fires start with one match. It was time.”
He and partner and general manager Joyce Kim developed Boonie Foods, first as a sellout pop-up, then as a stand at Revival Food Hall peddling rice plates and tacos.
That year, viral took on new meaning for the culture when husband-and-wife fine-dining veterans Tim Flores and Genie Kwon debuted Kasama as a carryout cafe with French-inflected pastries, homestyle Filipino American cooking and a cheesy longanisa egg sandwich that became an overnight sensation, drawing two-hour waits. The restaurant, which was featured on “The Bear,” eventually added a tasting menu featuring imaginative dishes like mushroom adobo with vinegary mussel foam. In 2022, it became the world’s first Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant and won James Beard Foundation Awards in 2022 and 2023. (Boonie’s and Bayan Ko both were named to Michelin’s Bib Gourmand list in 2024.)
“Our community shows up”
In 2023, the year Boonie’s debuted its brick-and-mortar storefront with crisp-edged sisig (the popular minced pork and chicken liver hash) and confoundingly juicy chicken inasal (marinated grilled chicken), Fontelera still only counted 23 Filipino restaurants in the greater Chicago area. These days, he estimates that number is close to 40.
“We’re not there yet,” he says, though he feels his original, righteously indignant motivation for starting Boonie’s is edging closer to obsolescence.
“We’re closer to that point when a Filipino entrepreneur can open a Filipino business without worrying about that extra layer of culture,” Fontelera said. “All they have to worry about is the business s–t.”
He guesses that the viral success of more recent Fil-Am openings owes not just to the relative lack of options but the tight-knit support the community elicits: “Anytime something new comes up, our community is gonna show up.”
Meanwhile, broader demand for inventive Filipino cooking is feeding Almeda’s sense of urgency to bring ideas to life as fast as he can. Yet even by his standards, Kanin’s was a quick opening — from idea to opening day in a little over six months.
Almeda knew they had a hit last September, when the Kanin crew first popped up at Novel Pizza and within 30 minutes had sold out of 300-odd musubi, with toppings like traditional grilled Spam brushed with sweet soy and longanisa and egg, which are popular in corner stores throughout Hawaii. Two weeks later, a second pop-up at Side Practice sold out in 45 minutes. By November — a mere three months after Almeda and Tacadena met — the duo bought the storefront next to Side Practice, with plans for a standalone bodega slinging casual, Filipino- and Hawaiian-inspired snacks and sweets like ube-banana pudding. The speed helped quell Tacadena’s impostor syndrome as a chef without formal training.
“That pace Francis works on forced me to be as authentic as I’ve ever been in my life,” Tacadena said. “But this is also food that we are so proud of, that a lot of my generation was almost forced to not hide.”
Kanin soft-opened for friends and family in early March. Kanin partner and head of marketing Noah Rabaya made sure to extend the invite to a handful of local Fil-Am food influencers, whom Tacadena credits with the opening day swell in March that yielded two-block-long lines, which forced them to close the day after to regroup.
“We cooked every piece of food we had, including the food we prepped for what we thought would be service on Sunday,” Tacadena said. Undeterred by the crush, he’s already envisioning a musubi revolution, with a handful more Kanin locations across the city and suburbs. Kanin is also kicking off a creative food and art pop-up series of its own starting July 6 — all thanks to those who paved the way before.
Maggie Hennessy is a Chicago-based food and drink writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Bon Appetit and Food & Wine. Follow her on Instagram.