Why Kasama matters.
Kasama is a celebrated Filipino restaurant where Ukrainian Village's independent culinary culture meets the heritage of Filipino home cooking, the precision of contemporary pastry and a groundbreaking chapter in Chicago's MICHELIN-starred dining history.
Set along North Winchester Avenue near West Augusta Boulevard and just steps from Commercial Club Park, the restaurant occupies a modest corner storefront in Ukrainian Village, surrounded by historic brick residences, neighborhood businesses and the residential streets extending west from Ashland Avenue. Large windows bring natural light into a dining room whose pale wood surfaces, restrained furnishings and open counter establish an intimate connection between the kitchen and the surrounding neighborhood. The daytime bakery counter presents carefully arranged pastries alongside Filipino breakfast preparations, creating a setting that combines the informality of a neighborhood café with the technical refinement of an ambitious culinary kitchen. An outdoor patio extends the dining space into the surrounding residential environment, reinforcing the restaurant's relationship with the quieter streets of West Town. The result is a restaurant whose understated physical character, distinctive daytime bakery and intimate evening dining room bring exceptional culinary ambition into the everyday fabric of a historic Chicago neighborhood.
What defines Kasama.
Kasama is best known for becoming the world's first MICHELIN-starred Filipino restaurant and establishing one of Chicago's most influential combinations of Filipino cuisine, contemporary pastry and intimate tasting-menu dining. Husband-and-wife chefs Tim Flores and Genie Kwon opened the restaurant in July 2020, bringing together Flores' Filipino-American culinary heritage and Kwon's extensive background in fine-dining pastry. Flores grew up in Chicago's suburbs in a Filipino household, developing an early familiarity with the ingredients, flavors and family traditions that subsequently became central to his cooking. His professional experience included work at GT Fish & Oyster and Oriole, the two-MICHELIN-starred Chicago restaurant where he served as chef de cuisine under chef Noah Sandoval. Kwon trained at the Culinary Institute of America and developed her pastry career through influential kitchens including Eleven Madison Park in New York and Oriole in Chicago. The couple originally conceived Kasama as a restaurant combining a daytime Filipino-American bakery with a more ambitious evening dining program, a concept whose opening coincided with the extraordinary disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic restrictions forced the business to begin primarily through takeaway service, and the resulting bakery operation rapidly developed a devoted following for its Filipino breakfast dishes and technically elaborate pastries. The restaurant's name means “together” in Tagalog, expressing the partnership between Flores and Kwon and the relationship between Filipino culinary traditions and contemporary American fine dining. MICHELIN awarded Kasama one star in its 2022 Chicago guide, making the restaurant the first Filipino establishment anywhere in the world to receive that distinction. The recognition marked a consequential development for Filipino cuisine within international fine dining, elevating a culinary tradition historically underrepresented in MICHELIN's American restaurant selections. Kasama subsequently received national attention through the James Beard Foundation, with Flores and Kwon winning the 2023 award for Best Chef: Great Lakes. The restaurant's evolution from a pandemic-era takeaway operation into a MICHELIN-starred dining destination established one of Chicago's most compelling contemporary culinary success stories.
Genie Kwon's pastry program gives Kasama a character that extends far beyond the conventional boundaries of a neighborhood bakery, combining classical French technique with Filipino ingredients and an unusually precise approach to texture. The celebrated ube and huckleberry Basque cake brings together the earthy sweetness of purple yam, the acidity of berries and the richness of a deeply caramelized exterior. Kwon's black truffle croissant represents another signature achievement, layering laminated pastry with a concentrated truffle filling that transforms a familiar breakfast format into an exceptionally elaborate savory preparation. Her longanisa breakfast sandwich provides a complementary expression of the kitchen's Filipino heritage, combining the distinctive sweetness and spice of Filipino sausage with a fried egg and carefully balanced accompaniments. Flores' savory cooking develops the restaurant's cultural character through preparations rooted in Filipino family traditions, including adobo, kare-kare and other dishes shaped by the country's complex relationship with indigenous ingredients, Spanish colonial influence and regional cooking practices. The evening tasting menu translates these foundations into a more elaborate progression, using refined sauces, carefully controlled cooking and modern plating techniques to develop concentrated expressions of Filipino flavor. Seafood preparations incorporate the acidity of calamansi and the savory depth of fermented ingredients, establishing a distinctive relationship between traditional Filipino seasonings and contemporary fine-dining technique. Meat courses develop richer flavors through long cooking, concentrated reductions and the blend of sweetness, salt and acidity characteristic of many Filipino preparations. Kwon's desserts complete the meal through intricate pastry construction, controlled sweetness and the integration of tropical ingredients, carrying the culinary partnership into its final expression. The restaurant's dual character creates an unusual continuity between daytime accessibility and evening technical ambition, establishing Filipino cuisine as the organizing principle across two distinct approaches to hospitality.
How Kasama fits.
Kasama works as the culinary centerpiece for an outing connecting Ukrainian Village's historic residential architecture, its distinctive Eastern European cultural institutions and the neighborhood's enduring relationship with Chicago's immigrant communities.
Begin at St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, the expansive religious building whose twin towers and Byzantine-inspired architecture establish one of Ukrainian Village's most recognizable historic landmarks. The parish originated in 1905 as Chicago's growing Ukrainian community organized institutions dedicated to preserving its religious and cultural traditions. Architect Worthmann & Steinbach designed the present cathedral, completed in 1915, drawing on the architectural language of Eastern Christian churches and the expansive domed forms associated with Ukrainian religious heritage. The building's elaborate interior decoration, iconography and ceremonial spaces express the continuity of Ukrainian Catholic worship within the city's immigrant history. Continue to Ukrainian National Museum, the cultural institution dedicated to preserving the artistic, historical and political heritage of Ukraine and the Ukrainian-American community. Founded in 1952, the museum developed through the efforts of Ukrainian immigrants and community organizations seeking to preserve cultural materials displaced by war, migration and political upheaval. Its collections include traditional embroidery, folk costumes, ceramics, historical photographs and archival materials documenting the experiences of Ukrainian communities across successive generations. Exhibitions connect the history of Ukrainian immigration to Chicago with the broader cultural and political development of Ukraine, giving the neighborhood a significant institutional center for cultural preservation. Conclude at Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral, the remarkable Ukrainian Village church designed by Louis Sullivan and completed in 1903. Sullivan developed the building for Chicago's Russian Orthodox community, adapting the architectural traditions of Eastern Orthodox churches through a compact composition of domes, arches and carefully controlled ornamental details. The cathedral received National Historic Landmark designation in 1976, recognizing its architectural significance within Sullivan's body of work. Its survival within the surrounding residential streets preserves an exceptional example of the architect's religious design, connecting the neighborhood's immigrant institutions to one of the most influential figures in American architectural history. The progression moves from St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral's expansive expression of Ukrainian religious character through the Ukrainian National Museum's preservation of immigrant cultural heritage and culminates in Louis Sullivan's Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral, placing Kasama within the architectural and cultural history of Chicago's Ukrainian Village.
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