About Kasama
There is no more unlikely two-Michelin-star story in Chicago than Kasama. At 1001 North Winchester Avenue in West Town, chef-owners Tim Flores and Genie Kwon have created something entirely without precedent: a Filipino-American bakery that operates as a casual neighbourhood gathering spot from morning to mid-afternoon — ube pandesal, ensaymada, pastries and coffee — and then transforms each evening into a reservation-only tasting menu experience that holds two of the city's most coveted Michelin stars.
Flores and Kwon met while working in fine dining, married, and opened Kasama in 2020. The daytime bakery was a pandemic necessity and a community statement. The evening tasting menu was the restaurant they always wanted to build. Both sides of the operation are integral — the couple refused to abandon the neighbourhood bakery when the stars arrived, and that refusal is part of what makes Kasama extraordinary. This is not a restaurant that became institutional when it became successful. It remained exactly itself.
The tasting menu — 15-18 courses, offered Wednesday through Saturday evenings — draws deeply on Filipino culinary tradition while deploying the technique of two chefs trained in the highest levels of American fine dining. Ancestral ingredients — calamansi, sinigang, bagoong, adobo preparations — appear in contexts that recontextualise them without diminishing them. This is not fusion cooking. It is cultural reinterpretation at its most intelligent.
The Filipino-American Culinary Philosophy
Flores and Kwon approach Filipino cuisine with the reverence of culinary historians and the freedom of chefs who have spent their careers in white-tablecloth kitchens. A course built around kare-kare — the peanut-based oxtail stew of Filipino Sunday gatherings — appears deconstructed across three components, each illuminating a different aspect of the dish's flavour architecture. Pork preparations draw on lechon tradition but arrive as precision-cooked slices with crackling of extraordinary delicacy. House-made bread, served warm with compound butter, bridges the bakery and the tasting room in a way that feels genuinely poetic.
The wine program reflects the kitchen's range — California natural wines sit alongside Champagne and aged Riesling, all selected for their ability to amplify the acidic, bright, often fermented flavours of the cooking.
Why Kasama for a First Date
Kasama is the finest first-date restaurant in Chicago precisely because it does not feel like a first-date restaurant. The room is warm and intimate — no more than 30 tasting-menu covers — but the ambience is more neighbourhood than ceremony. The tasting-menu format eliminates decision anxiety and creates a shared experience. The food is thrilling enough to provide genuine conversation material. And bringing a first date to Kasama says something specific about you: that you found something extraordinary that the world hasn't universally discovered yet, and you chose to share it with them first.
Why Kasama for a Proposal
The intimacy of the room, the personal character of the cooking — you understand this food was made by two people deeply committed to each other and to their craft — creates a setting charged with meaning. The team at Kasama responds to proposal requests with warmth; they understand romance. A proposal at Kasama says you chose originality over convention, and that you understand that the best things in life require knowing where to look.