Four years after closing Sate Kampar, chef Ange Branca is back — with two new restaurants

Ange Branca faced a difficult decision: It was May 2020, and the pandemic had closed her acclaimed Malaysian BYOB Sate Kampar for indoor dining. At some point, she knew, it would reopen. But the landlord had offered her a new lease, and he wanted 15% more.

Was she willing to move? And if so, to where?

She walked away. For four years, she roamed, doing pop-ups and cooking catered meals out of friends’ kitchens. Along the way, she met like-minded chefs who were hustling from gig to gig, and while working out of an unused kitchen at the Bok building, she used her corporate-management experience to create Kampar Kitchen, a business incubator that supports chefs from diverse backgrounds.

This week, Branca returns to the restaurant business with Kampar, an ambitious concept that will see two restaurants under one roof. On the second floor is a kongsi, or social club, that will feature an à la carte menu of Malaysian cuisine, including Sate Kampar favorites such as achat (spicy nyonya-pickled vegetables), rendang (braised beef in spices and coconut cream), and nasi lemak (rice wrapped in banana leaf). Branca can’t offer her signature coconut-briquette-grilled skewers because the exhaust system lacks the oomph.

In the kongsi, Branca is also introducing Hakka cooking, a Chinese cuisine preserved in Kampar, her hometown, with dishes such as wagyu suen poon chee (“abacus seeds” made with taro and stir-fried with wagyu beef, fermented vegetables, and oyster sauce) and chili pan mee (a hand-cut noodle served with a pork topping, soft-boiled egg, and a spoonful of spicy shrimp chili crisps and crispy anchovies).

On the first floor, opening later, will be a second restaurant that will offer a fixed-price tasting menu by a chef in residence. The idea is to spotlight chefs from other underrepresented cultures, such as Sri Lankan cuisine, which is too often lumped into Indian food, Branca said.

The restaurant at 611 S. Seventh St. in Bella Vista was a pizzeria. Fittingly, it was called Nomad.

Ange Branca, born Angelina May Yee Phang, is Hakka, a people from China known for their distinct culture and waves of migration. Many who arrived in Malaysia, like Branca’s ancestors, worked as laborers in the tin mines. Branca said that her father was the first male in five generations who did not work in the mines; he left Kampar to study engineering and was working in Singapore when she was born 50 years ago.

Branca went to university and was a strategist for the management-consulting firm Deloitte when she arrived in Philadelphia in 2000. She met John Branca, who owned a rock-climbing gym with his brother. For years, she wrestled with homesickness for the food she grew up with. By 2016, Ange had talked John into opening Sate Kampar in a former bottle shop in a storefront on East Passyunk Avenue.

She originally envisioned Sate Kampar as a kopitiam-style restaurant — a mini-food hall of sorts — with multiple chefs cooking a variety of cuisines in stalls. But she decided to go solo.

With her grilled skewers and a bar serving coffee and tea drinks, Sate Kampar was a novelty in a town largely unfamiliar with Malaysian cuisine.

“We were trying to create an experience so that people can understand that Malaysia is a country in Asia, and this is not Chinese food,” Branca said recently. “Other than days where I make special noodles, we would never hand anyone a pair of chopsticks. You would eat with your spoon or your hands.”

Sate Kampar immediately captured glowing reviews, followed by a 2017 semifinalist’s spot for a James Beard Award.

Branca is finally going to host other chefs in her space, but instead of a kopitiam-style restaurant, she will partner with a single chef for a two-year residency.

“I would like them to have their own restaurant when they leave here,” Branca said of the resident chef. “Pop-ups are great to get our feet wet. But there is still a bridge between pop-ups to owning and running your own restaurant. You need to be able to create a financial history to get the required funding when they need to. For people making underrepresented food, it is very difficult to get funding.”

Kampar’s second-floor bar, with the words “Kampar Kongsi” written in Chinese characters in neon, will be a focal point. A kongsi is an after-hours social club in the middle of a tin mine, Branca explained. “The chef is very important because the best chefs attract the best workers to the mine.”

Kampar’s bar is overseen by general manager Sam Pritchard, a longtime bartender. More than a cocktail bar, Pritchard sees it as “a new opportunity to continue to find ways to tell the story of [Branca’s] community and her people.” It will be open only for walk-ins, at first.

Pritchard said working on the bar program has been “both a treat and a challenge.” The bar is fully stocked, and includes some Southeast Asian bottles such as Sông Cái floral, a Vietnamese gin, and Batavia Arrack, a rum made with red Javanese rice. There’s also Shou Wu Chih, a Chinese patent medicine, as a mixer.

The idea, Pritchard said, is “to lean into the concept of social club. I want this to be a bar that creates a space that is both engaging but also really a home for the growing AAPI community in Philadelphia. I think as restaurant people, we all know that that is such a huge part of the story of what Philadelphia’s food scene looks like right now, and I think we have a unique opportunity to create a really fun, safe community space here.”