Shopping with King Phojanakong

Kuma Inn's baby bok choy

I wanted to meet the man who transformed Chinese sausage. In my mind, Chinese sausage has always been a cheap but delectable staple like the hot dog. Fully cooked, long shelf life, stuffed with fat, and normally smoked. Unlike the hot dog, Chinese sausage is sweet and dried. Mothers can keep it in the pantry and throw it into anything for a little taste and protein – fried rice, omelettes, and stir-fries.

King Phojanakong, owner and chef of Kuma Inn, took this humble ingredient and sang it a new tune. He put it to a high flame and added caramelized onions. Then, he offered it with his Thai chile-lime dipping sauce. The dish went from being the original "Sea of Love" song to Cat Power’s cover, familiar but newly seductive. (For a suitable photo of the dish, click here.)

If you added the amount of money the gang and I have spent on this dish over the past three years, you might have been able to put a down payment on a boat named Porky’s Wake. The last time we were at Kuma Inn, I "politely" asked the table if we could refrain from ordering the 3 dishes that contained Chinese sausage.

I wanted to pick Phojanakong's brain, so I arranged a meeting.When I catch up with him in Chinatown he is grabbing the meat at his butcher’s for the evening service. “I pretty much shop every day. As long as you are working with fresh product, you don’t have to do too much to it,” he said.

His Lower East Side restaurant has a menu that is inspired by dishes from all over Asia but with deft touches from his French training. It seems like he, along with the likes of David Chang from Momofuku and Sohui Kim of The Good Fork, is part of a growing movement of Asian chefs who have used their eclectic training backgrounds to open up their own small, personal restaurants and stake a unique toehold in the New York culinary scene. 

When Phojanakong graduated from City College of New York with a degree in archaeology and psychology, he had no designs to be a chef. But food had always been an important part of his life, with both his Filipino mother and his Thai father cooking at home. Summers growing up were spent in the Philippines where food was the centerpiece for weddings, funerals and all social engagements in between. “You can meet a stranger off of the street, they don’t even know you and they will invite you to come eat,” Phojanakong said.

At 27, he was working as an engineer for a nonprofit when he decided to enroll at CIA. Realizing he needed to catch up quickly with all those French men who had started as teenage dishwashers, he loitered outside of back doors at places like Daniel and Jean Georges. The hustling paid off when executive chef of Daniel, Alex Lee, invited him to chop shallots for a whole afternoon. From there he became Daniel's intern. The other two interns did not last very long, but Phojanakong survived, albeit 25 pounds lighter than when he started.

Pork tonkatsu with watercress salad and lime butter

“I saw grown men cry every day. I would ride the bus and think what’s going to happen today,” he said. “But I love what I do.” As we stand on the street with the throngs of shoppers bumping into us constantly, it is easy to understand how he made it through culinary boot camp. He is jocular and unmoved, focused on telling stories  and picking up his meats.  The experience at Daniel led to stints at Bouley, Danube and The Grocery. 

His tapas style menu has a core of dishes that stay constant but he adds things to the menu daily, depending on what he finds at the market and how his staff react to his experiments. “I’ll start off a dish as a staff meal and then people will eat it and go ‘Yeah!’, and so I put it on the menu.” A trip that he took to the Phillippines inspired him to make a pork belly dish called kawali. The belly is braised and then set out to dry for several hours under a fan before it is deep fried to a delectable crispiness.

The word fusion makes the chef very uncomfortable, understandably so. This is not a reckless menu of marriages where foie gras is seen cavorting with black bean sauce. Everything on his menu is subtle and carefully thought out. “At Bouley, I learned how flavors work together,” he said. Seared scallops are delicately cooked with sake, bacon and kalamansi, a Filpino citrus fruit that is a cross between a lime and a tangerine. Tuna tartare is seasoned with chive oil, something he picked up from Jean Georges, but Phojanakong uses the Asian garlic chives instead. The prices for each dish range from  $5 to $10, a good value considering the quality of the food. “Even if you are not paying $300 to $400, I want the details to be the same,” he said.

At first glance, the out of the way location of the restaurant on the second floor above a bar is a little odd. Once the ascent up the staircase is made,  the chef's logic for what the restaurant should be- an oasis from the concrete jungle of New York- makes perfect sense.  At Kuma Inn, you feel like you are in someone's warm and woody apartment and the street noise of the young and drunk feels miles away. Sipping from a choice of the extensive sake selection is enhanced by the chef’s excellent music mixes. Chinese sausage aside, a place that can rock early 90s hip hop gets another fork in my book.

For the moment, he has his hands full working on a Filipino cookbook and looking at real estate in Williamsburg for another restaurant. He laments the dearth of Filipino restaurants in New York and lack of interest in the food.  “Even these Filipino restaurants in Queens are more like bakeries,” he said. For now Kuma Inn, a reference to the Filipino word  kumain which means “to eat” is a wonderful start to to New York’s education.

Kuma Inn    113 Ludlow St, 2nd Fl.    212-353-8866

Comments

[pooja]

Hi Michelle
Your foreign correspondent has been pretty busy..keep writing..I'll see you soon

[Michelle]

Hi Pooja!!! Keep him working. The mention of an old Irani place has sent me a atwitter.

L,

M

[Bon Vivant]

I've always wanted to go to Kuma Inn. I don't really have an excuse since I usually stay right around the corner. I guess my many trips to Momofuku Noodle Bar keeps me from trying new restaurants.

[Michelle]

Hi BV,

Well, you should go! Maybe you can do a marathon where you eat at Kuma Inn first and then go to Momofuku. Call ahead to make a reservation.

-M

[alyce]

love it!
love you!

xo

[Michelle]

Alyce,

Thanks sweetie.

-M

[Paul]

i like the new template -- the old one was a little dark and depressing.

[Michelle]

Thanks Paul. I finally got off my butt to pep things up around here.

[groceries philippines]

King Phojanakong looks like our own pechay. I wonder if King Phojanakong is available in groceries. It looks like so yummy. Thanks for this post.

-krisha-