At Kampar Kitchen, You Can Take Home a Meal by a Different Chef Every Night
With this innovative venture, Ange Branca of Saté Kampar is providing a platform for a new generation of talent.
Jacob Trinh of TrinhEats grills chicken for a recent Kampar Kitchen meal. | Photo courtesy of Jacob Trinh
When Saté Kampar closed back in May of 2020, it wasn’t clear what Ange Branca would do next. She had built a dedicated audience of diners over her 5 years on Passyunk Avenue, serving Malaysian street food-style saté, hand-pulled tea and coffee, and a rotating selection of specials like grilled fish and long-simmered beef curry. The clearest path was to wait out the pandemic, then reopen in a new space. But that’s not what Branca did.
Instead, she partnered with the Bok building, renting out their now-empty event space and creating Kampar Kitchen, her new concept that serves as a kind of chef incubator and ghost kitchen. The vision is so simple and brilliant it’s almost confusing that no one has done it yet: Each day of the week, a different chef will pop-up at the kitchen to create a meal. Kampar Kitchen handles all the logistics: advertising (which happens almost exclusively on Instagram), selling the food, ordering, and paying rent to Bok building. Soon Kampar Kitchen will handle delivery, bringing the food to a wider audience and sparing the chefs the huge cuts that delivery apps take. This leaves the chefs to simply do what they do best: cook.
Kampar Kitchen is currently partnered with a handful of chefs: Jacob Trinh, who makes dishes with influences from Vietnam, China and the States; Joy Parham, who prepares soul food; Cote Tapia-Marmugi, who specializes in vegetarian versions of Chilean food; Ruth Nakaar, whose West African pop-up Fudena we’re already obsessed with; Chris Paul, who shares the wonders of Haitian cuisine; and John Paul, who cooks Filipino food.
Branca herself is also cooking regularly, but she says the project is about using the platform she has amassed over the last 10 years to bring attention to a new community of cooks. As the current group of chefs moves on — whether to their own brick-and-mortar restaurants or another next step — she’ll bring in another pop-up to replace them, with the hope that Kampar Kitchen will be a source of vitality for the restaurant industry as it works to get back on its feet post-pandemic.
“What does culinary diversity mean and look like in 2021?” Branca said. “I’ve been thinking about that question a lot, and Kampar Kitchen is kind of my answer.”
You can check out the different meals and place an order now on the Kampar website.
Philadelphia magazine is one of more than 20 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and economic mobility in the city. Read all our reporting here.
