Hi, everyone!
It’s Dennis. I’m so, so, sorry about the pause in the newsletter.
Ashok over at Eater Chicago (who was recently nominated for a James Beard Award!) ran such a nice piece about us and we got such a wonderful boost. So many of you signed up in support of The Party Cut, and who knows, maybe it was the stress of working for years non-stop, but my body decided it had enough of something, and I ended up in the damn emergency room.
I’m currently in the middle of trying to figure out what’s going on (scans and tests seem to indicate I’m okay), but right now I’m dealing with an ongoing bout of chronic mystery pain. My doctors and I are still trying to piece things together. Unfortunately, this makes doing basic things like eating really difficult, so hitting up new restaurants as regularly as I have been is going to have to slow down until these symptoms get better. That means the newsletter won’t be going out as fast as I’d like until I get back on my feet.
That being said, I’ve got a guest this week, none other than my good friend John Carruthers of Crust Fund Pizza. I don’t know if you all know this, but aside from being an incredible charitable force for good, John is a stellar writer, and in fact, that’s how I originally met him — through food writing, many years ago.
He offered to cover a place that opened up in his neighborhood of Ravenswood earlier this year, and now that it’s slightly easier to get in, he did just that. So I’m going to direct your attention to him today, and I’m so grateful for all of you for continuing to be here while I do my best to recover.
- Dennis
Opening a restaurant, even a Spam-centered Hawaiian-Filipino bodega, involves a lot of gauging folks’ reactions and making instinctive adjustments.
And one day, not long after Kanin opened on the Bowmanville/Ravenswood end of Lincoln Square at Damen and Foster, some guy was absolutely staring down chef/owner Julius Tacadena. From his car.
This wasn’t the usual “I’m stuck at a red light” glazed-over stare. It was intent. (Though yes, he was stuck at a red light.) In a flash, thought turned into frantic action and that motorist threw his car into park and sprinted toward the garden-level bodega with purpose. Tacadena already had a bag ready for the breathless “two Longganisas?” order/question/gasp. Tap of the phone, exchange of a bag, turn of the heel, and the man made his green light with nary a honk.
People really like Kanin’s musubi.
As a longtime Ravenswood resident I’m not overly used to hyped restaurant openings. I love this neighborhood, but it’s much more of a Big-Ten-hoodies and wings-at-the-bar sort of scene. Lincoln Square is like if you turned a brewery with children allowed in it into an entire Aldermanic ward. So imagine everyone’s surprise when a several-block-long line appeared for Kanin’s soft opening back in March. And the seemingly endless parade of foodie and influencer photos and videos followed those hundreds of people, and just kept going. I can tell you it was the talk of school drop off that following Monday. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We’re simple folk up here.
Now that systems are in place, and the lines have descended from opening FOMO levels, the corner-store vibe is in effect and Kanin’s humming along as a quick pop-in for breakfast or lunch. World’s Only Food Writer Ever Dennis Lee asked me to check it out and report back, as I’ve repeatedly told him over the years that I would eat all the Spam necessary to help him out if the need ever arose. I also have a little history with Hawaiian food*.
Of course we’ll start with the cornerstone of the whole operation – the regular Spam Musubi ($3.50).
Spam Musubi is a block of short-grain rice (Kokuho Rose, in this case), seasoned with furikake, topped with a perfectly-seared slice of Spam, and wrapped in nori. You can get them almost everywhere in Hawaii – grocery stores, gas stations, golf courses, tourist shops, and some really fantastic multigenerational Japanese-American stores that still survive (big love to Kawamoto Store in Hilo). It is, off the top of my head, the only food that really necessitates finishing under a tight seal of plastic wrap to steam and marry, even if only for a minute or so.
Speaking of, here’s a story ripped from the headlines of my alarming personal habits. In the run-up to the Super Bowl earlier this year, while Tacadena and crew were still getting things ready for the opening, Kanin advertised limited quantities of musubi boxes available at neighboring Side Practice Coffee. Eighteen musubis, snug as a bug in a Kanin-stamped pizza box. I ordered a box intending to share them with the family for the weekend. I ate a couple on the way home, then a couple more while doing things around the house.
By the time I noticed the dent I had put into that box, I ate the rest over the next day and a half and shamefully hid the evidence. Then I made nachos for the Super Bowl. So if your take on musubi is “it’s… just Spam and seasoned rice?” then I get you, but this is my way of letting you know that it does the trick for a lot of people. Me included.
All that said, my favorite musubi might be the Tomato Jam and Egg ($4.50) for the way the pop of the basic tomato jam (made with tomatoes, shallots, olive oil, butter, and salt) explodes in measured quantity through the rice and slices of sweet, fluffy, dashi-spiked tamago egg.
That egg likewise shines in the already-mentioned Longganisa ($6), which quite nearly draws neck-and-neck with the Spam offering for best seller.
As a production reality, that means that Tacadena sources around 400 pounds from a purveyor in Wheeling once a week. Three hours round trip is worth it for the rich, flavorful pork sausage as long as I’m not the one driving. I can see why you’d want to race a red light for a couple of these. The perfectly textured eggs tie the whole bite together.
Tamarind Shrimp ($5) gets a little pop from the sweet/sour namesake brushed atop pre-fried tempura shrimp from a purveyor.
Kanin’s tiny kitchen somehow fits ten souls turning out food at peak time, but there’s no fryer. I’d probably try and sneak a few sliced chilis underneath for a spicy angle, but that would require not eating all the musubi on the way home. Haven’t managed that yet.
And to that point: while Kanin has seating, there’s about three tables that fill up pretty quick.
Tacadena is frequently posted up at one, as he juggles his musubi shop and a full-time tech gig. So as the weather improves, you may want to head to beautiful and spacious Winnemac Park for a picnic. Do me a favor and remind all the off-leash dog folks that I hate them!
Aside from musubi, Kanin also offers bento boxes, including a Kalua Pork I haven’t tried yet and a BBQ Chicken Bento ($13) available from 11 a.m. onward.
A bed of seasoned rice, adorned with grilled and sliced bbq chicken thigh brought back some really great cookout memories. Every Hawaiian dad, according to Tacadena, loves throwing chicken on the grill at the slightest provocation.
Kanin’s is juicy, flavorful, and not overdressed to the point of losing the chicken flavor or making the rice soggy. Small piles of pickled ginger and pickled yellow daikon offer welcome pops of color and flavor. My one ask would be for a little sidecar of the sauce, because I am a sticky little sauce boy sometimes. Please don’t tell anyone.
There are a couple of grab-and-go sides to round out your meal.
The cucumber salad ($4) is the kind of snack I love to make for meals at home. Persian cucumbers, salt, sugar, and a little gochugaru.
The other one is macaroni salad.
I do not like macaroni salad, as it has traditionally been served to me in glop form, from family reunions to my first foodservice job to “elevated” attempts as an adult. But hot damn, I actually found room in my heart for Kanin’s mac salad ($4).
Elbow noodles are intentionally overcooked and rinsed (bye, starch!) before a quick soak in cider vinegar. It’s then lightly dressed with mayo, milk, salt, sugar, black pepper, shredded carrot, and shredded green onion. It’s lightly sweet, fresh, and I felt transported to a beach one thousand miles away from the nearest cafeteria tray.
Funny enough, one of Tacadena’s “non negotiable” items (in his words) isn’t made in-house at all. It’s the canned Hawaiian Sun ($2.50) juices that bear the telltale ridged-shoulder look of a beverage canned in Hawaii.
They’re a familiar multi-hued sight at cookouts, birthday parties, and community meetings and everyone has their favorite flavor. I’m a Fruit Punch man myself, and if there’s a better way to down 68% of my daily recommended sugars in 12 ounces, I’d like to hear it. Mango Orange, Strawberry Lilikoi, Guava Nectar, Pineapple Orange… go nuts.
This is all avoiding the purple elephant in the room.
That Ube Banana Pudding ($8.75). I mean, what to say except, holy shit. Like any self-respecting middle-aged man, I’m primed to hate on anything so thoroughly Instagrammed as Kanin’s signature dessert. That feeling dissipates by the third bite, and by the fifth you just kind of feel like a misanthrope for having gone in like that.
If you haven’t had ube before, it’s a vividly purple tuber that throws off vanilla custard flavor with just enough interesting earthy/nutty character to make it the ideal protagonist for a sweet dessert. Kanin’s comes in an ice cream pint container filled to the brim. Pop the top and you get to excavate through an airy whipped cream crown, into soft cream and cake, until you hit a rich vein of sweet purple yam.
Mixing as you go is a big part of the fun, and there’s plenty of that to do with this serving size that always lasts me a little longer than one sitting but never survives the first fridge scrounge. The Southern-descended, college-in-Appalachia person in me almost didn’t even notice the lack of familiar Nilla wafer crunch.
I live just a couple blocks from Kanin, and yam dessert is now a regular impulse item for me. Big credit to Tacadena and crew, because I never saw that coming. And I’m not the only one, as Tacadena says that customers routinely come in just to buy and carry off a dozen or more ube puddings. The musubi business, he told me, is doing really well. The dessert business is rapidly becoming its own gigantic thing. They’ve recently introduced another banana pudding that swaps out mango for the ube. I’ll try it one day.
I would be remiss in failing to mention that Kanin features a wall of imported snacks at the back wall of the shop. But the ube pudding has, so far, kept me from sampling the offerings. Champagne problems.
If it sounds like I know a lot about the makeup of these dishes, it’s because Tacadena told me.
He will, in fact, tell everyone the recipe for anything Kanin makes, and doesn’t pretend to stand on ceremony or have a trick up his sleeve. The food is prepared simply, provided you don’t get into what happens before the Spam gets into the tin. I really enjoy that approach, considering my generation’s increasing urge to take something we all like and attempt to own it, fuss it up, or close it off.
Local food Reddit’s latest tactic to combat hype is to just sort of name the thing a restaurant does well, and in doing so insist *name of thing* can’t be worth the attention. I worry about the kids these days.
So it’s just Spam? Yes, it’s just Spam. And it fucking rules.
I visited four times in preparation for the writeup, and paid for my food each time. I came in after those visits for my talk with Tacadena, and he insisted on sending me out with some musubis, a bento, and the yam pudding that haunts my dreams. At the risk of summoning three Michael Nagrants to my bedchamber the night before Christmas, I accepted. Like the sign says, Everybody Eats.
Kanin
5131 N. Damen Ave.
Chicago, IL 60625
Hours:
Closed Mondays
Tuesday - Sunday: 8 a.m. - 4 p.m.
*Dropping this down here so as to not make a long article even longer. But my first job out of college was working for a very small newspaper in a very small town on the island of Moloka’i. It was published by John McAfee, before… the difficulties. And it was like RIGHT before, so I wasn’t there all that long. Really just long enough to have had a library card, favorite Spam preparations, and a free-roaming chicken alarm clock courtesy of the neighbors.
I left with some bad pictures, no discernible tan, and all of Sam Choy’s cookbooks. Basically, I’m your friend who went to England for a semester and came back saying “cheers,” except my button-up shirts are way cooler. They have parrots on them. Aloha, clowns!
Well, there we have it. I’d seen Kanin hyped up as a major new spot (apparently that line was hard to miss), but John told me he’d been scoping out the joint until he could actually get in. And it sounds awesome.
Everyone thank Carruthers for today’s piece, and while you’re at it, you should follow him on social media. If you enjoyed it, don’t forget to share it on social media:
And thank you all for sticking with me while I figure out this whole health thing. I’m not going to push too hard for subscriptions today, but here’s the sign-up if you need it:
Okay, hope you’re all well, otherwise. I’ve missed you. I’ll get back into the swing of things as I can. Love you guys.
- D.
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The ube banana pudding was so good, I wrote a simple 5-star google review expressing as much. So happy to have this one in the neighborhood!
That Longganisa Musubi is fantastic!