Kampar Kitchen offers takeout menus with innovation, collaboration and diversity | Craig LaBan

Jacob Trinh, 23, has been on a mission to reconnect with his Vietnamese culinary roots since leaving his job as a burned-out line cook at Vernick Fish early last year, selling X.O. sauce at his family’s auto tag business while looking for another space to cook and share his birthright flavors with the public.

Joy Parham, 34, has been searching for a way to reach a broader audience for the weekend soul food meals she preps during the week out of Urban Country, the West Philadelphia catering company she runs with her husband, Gary McCoy.

Cote Tapia-Marmugi, 35, makes such gorgeous cakes that she won an episode of Netflix’s Sugar Rush and runs a thriving business, Mole Street Baker, out of her South Philly home. But she aspires to make savory food, too, with vegetarian takes on her Chilean family traditions.

Now with Ange Branca’s new Kampar Kitchen, a collaborative space producing different meal kits to-go five nights a week out of South Philly’s BOK Building, these chefs, and several others, have an opportunity to take the next steps.

“Let me tell you: I’m terrified,” says Tapia-Marmugi. “Cakes? No problem. Going savory is a whole new challenge. But that’s how great things start. And it’s a rare opportunity here because I don’t think I would have pushed myself to do it on my own.”

Branca intimately knows about the challenges of reinventing oneself through food. The former international business consultant for Deloitte, IBM, and Fujitsu moved from her native Malaysia to the United States for her corporate career — then gave it up to recreate the flavors of home at Saté Kampar. With the scent of skewers sizzling over coconut coals in the air, and an unwavering commitment to flavors that did not compromise with shortcuts, the East Passyunk BYOB she opened with husband John Branca in 2016 quickly became one of Philadelphia’s most compelling restaurants.

» READ MORE: Ange Branca’s Malaysian dishes sizzle at her pop-up dinner series

But after closing Saté Kampar last year due to a landlord dispute, compounded by the difficulties of COVID-19, the couple found themselves adrift, remaining active through pop-ups and community service efforts, but the lifetime savings they’d invested in their first space long gone, and their future uncertain.

“We don’t have Saté Kampar anymore and don’t have the equity or capital to build another restaurant from the ground up,” she said. “But our pride is strong, and we want to take the next step. So how do we come back to continue this journey in a Malaysian style?”

Enter Kampar Kitchen, created inside an unused catering kitchen at the multiuse BOK Building, where Branca did several pop-up meals last year. Branca’s sparkplug personality and natural affinity for bringing diverse groups together has made her the ideal impresario for assembling an intriguing roster of chefs looking for a venue to express their craft.

Check out the weekly menus with chef backstories on Instagram, where there’s a link to prepurchase meals. Ring the intercom after 5 p.m. on the South Ninth Street side of the converted old school building, and out comes a hearty feast for two ranging from $50 to $60.

One night might bring Trinh’s Ba Vi platter of grilled Vietnamese meats, herbs, and wrap-your-own rice paper rolls. Another could feature Chris Paul’s Haitian stewed conch and braised chicken patties. Parham, who cooked a fabulous New Year’s meal of smoky pork shoulder with onion gravy with crisply fried hot water corn bread, has anchored the Sunday slot with a steady lineup of soul food comforts. Meanwhile, there has been Filipino chicken with burnt coconut sauce from John Paul (a.k.a. Daps Can Cook), Tapia-Marmugi’s vegetarian take on Chilean pastel de choclos corn pies, and West African jollof rice feasts from Ruth Nakaar’s Fudena.

“It’s really more than an incubator,” says Branca. “I wanted to take all the things we’ve learned at Saté Kampar with regards to getting people to learn about the stories behind the food and culture and marry that together for these chefs, to work with them to really emanate the essence of their cuisine to the public to enjoy as an experience.”

Branca draws on her experience as a corporate strategist and restaurateur here. But the notion of melding such diverse flavors under one roof is also rooted in the tradition of the kopitiam, she says, noting that Malaysian coffee shops often house multiple food stalls serving specialties inside the same space: “They’re curated and collected by the owner so they compliment each other, and they all come together in a very collaborative way to create a single restaurant experience.”

That concept of an on-site dining experience, which Branca says is more cohesive than a typical food hall, cannot be realized until the post-COVID era.

But the synergy of that collective spirit channeled through takeout meal kits has proven to be a strength as Branca builds a model she believes begins to address issues of inequity — especially for chefs of color without ready access to capital — that have only grown during the pandemic. Branca says she’s trying to level the playing field for chefs of varying experience, charging a percentage of sales rather than an equal flat fee.

That resonated with an experienced chef like Joy Parham, a former culinary instructor, sous-chef at the Malvern Buttery, and caterer who’s owned a business since 2017 while juggling two young children.

“To have this space pop up, (Ange) was offering us another resource, a way to gain a little bit of equity in the food game here. If I was just cooking food and said, ‘Come pick this up from my house!’ you wouldn’t take me seriously,” says Parham, who isn’t currently interested in owning a restaurant. “People put a lot of emphasis on actually owning something. But people who actually own things also own a lot more stress than people who don’t. I can take my brand anywhere. The ownership is the freedom. Because I have the ability to say, ‘Ange, Sundays work for me,’ I know how to target that.”

Parham, who uses her catering company’s kitchen in West Philadelphia’s Enterprise Center to prep during the week, says Kampar Kitchen’s marketing reach to a broader audience is a prime draw.

For younger chefs like the Johnson & Wales-trained Trinh, however, Branca has taken on the role of culinary guru. Trinh, the son of immigrants who resisted embracing his Vietnamese food heritage until recently, has been recreating favorite dishes from his mother and grandma.

His grandmother Huong Vuong has already schooled him on the finer points of the fantastic little banh khot pancakes that come with his platter meal. She demanded a special pan she’d given Trinh returned after noticing that he was missing a crucial step in a picture on one of his social media posts: “After I did a couple rounds with her approval, she said, ‘Ok, now you can have my pan back.’”

Branca has helped Trinh dig even deeper. She sat beside him in Rittenhouse Square tasting through half-a-dozen commercial X.O. sauces to help him refine his own blend. She urged him to source traditional betel leaves (rather than the grape leaves more common in America) to wrap his beef-filled bò nuong lá lot. She helped him cure pork to create more supple meat stuffings. She told him the seafood-inspired origins of hoisin, which led him to add a dried seafood essence to his take on the dipping sauce.

“She really is my mentor,” says Trinh.

“He is turning out to be such an up and rising star,” says a beaming Branca. “So proud of him.”

» READ MORE: The search for XO sauce is a Philly food adventure

There is an additional benefit for all the chefs who use Kampar Kitchen with overlapping time slots, when the distinctive aromas from Asia, the Caribbean, and America frequently mingle in the air. There are currently seven chefs on the roster now, including Branca, who says there is a waiting list of 20 others.

“What’s interesting is that they seem so random, but they really do coexist … and it’s a fun experience,” says Trinh. “And it’s not really a pop-up, it’s a permanent location, so who knows what can happen?”

“We are really melding,” says Parham. “A lot of stories are shared. Ange actually made the hot water corn breads Sunday after seeing me make them for weeks. But this wasn’t surface-level stuff, we were actually learning about each other’s cultures.”

Something as elemental as plating rice, she says, can spark that understanding. When Parham recently asked Branca to help plate rice and beans, she suddenly had to stop her. Branca, relying on her experience with Malaysian cuisine, had put too much rice on the dish.

“The beans are the meal here, the rice is just to bulk it up,” said Parham, suddenly realizing she might also have offended Branca, whose cuisine makes rice a centerpiece. “I didn’t know that it was offensive to order a side of rice [at a Malaysian restaurant] — but I’ll never do that again.”

Branca was hardly offended.

“I thought it was hysterical,” said Branca. “Those are the moments when I think this platform is so special as all the chefs work together. If only we can grow in a way that captures more of these moments, these are the cultural learning experiences that are so needed right now.”