Congratulations to Tim Flores and Genie Kwon of One MICHELIN Star Kasama, the 2024 MICHELIN Guide Chicago Outstanding Service Award Winners!
With previous experiences at Two MICHELIN Star Oriole and One MICHELIN Star Boka, the two chefs have been most celebrated for creating Kasama, the world’s first MICHELIN-Starred Filipino restaurant, which doubles as a casual daytime bakery and a multicourse dinner destination.
Kasama shines with its delicious food (it also has the MICHELIN Inspectors’ favorite dessert in Chicago last year), and Chef Grant Achatz of Three Michelin Star Alinea recently picked it as Chicago’s most creative menu.
But what makes it even more special is its service: the team embodies a winning combination of professional polish and down-to-earth friendliness. Capturing the warm spirit of Filipino hospitality, the result is an experience that’s disarmingly approachable, but doesn’t miss a beat, sure to charm unfussy eaters and fine dining devotees alike.
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What does "really good service" mean to you?
Tim FloresIt seems a little contradictory, but we don't really care about the food. That doesn't mean we don't care about the food. We care about the food, but we're trying to take care of people first. We would always go back to a restaurant that has mediocre food with excellent service, but I'll never go back to an incredible restaurant with terrible service.
We need to first make sure we're taking care of our guests. We make mistakes, but it needs to be sincere. We're always trying to take care of people.
Genie Kwon
The ability to empathize with the guests is a big one that we instill in all of our training. We just want somebody to come in and know that we want to care for them. This is why we do it. If it wasn't for the act of giving somebody something and seeing how they respond to it, I don't think that either one of us would be cooking.
That's been our ethos about why we opened Kasama. We didn't necessarily have the business plan or the type of food that we were going to serve. It was more what type of place that we wanted to work. It's also about taking care of our team and what we can do to give them a better quality of life.
What's your favorite part of the guest experience?
Genie KwonWe have such a different demographic of people that come to the restaurant at all times of the day. And so when there's somebody that comes in for dinner, and they don't know that we do breakfast, and so then they'll come the next morning for breakfast and see the different atmosphere in the same space.
What is a typical night at the restaurant?
Tim FloresThe night is interesting because you'll go through the daytime and see the chaos and the madness, and then the night is so controlled and calm and relaxing. We wanted to make it feel cozy and still execute at a very high level, but we wanted to stray from being chaotic and rushing around.
How are you able to keep the team calm?
Tim FloresIn the morning, doing 1,000 people in a 30-seat restaurant is chaotic and crazy, but for that level of service, we keep our cool, and at night, the same thing. There's no need to panic and rush around as if this is something new. It's what we do every night. We should know this like the back of our hand. If we show that we're calm, then the guests will feel the same way.
What is the biggest misconception about your role?
Tim FloresOur role as owners is way more on the experience first than a single ingredient or a single dish, this concept, or anything like that. It's always starting with how it's being presented, and then we work backward to the food. And then we look at, how can we make this the most delicious thing that we can create or come up with, but we are way more service centric.
Genie Kwon
A lot of it is working backward, because sometimes you can create the most beautiful, perfect, intricate dish, but it's like, how are we going to create 500 of those and make them all the same?
Do you have any sustainable initiatives at the restaurant? How do you communicate these with the guests?
Tim FloresWe're able to utilize everything that we can at the restaurant. We're utilizing our entire product. We use the portion that we want to use for our dinner menu, and then the pieces that aren't perfect, we get to use for our daytime menu or staff meal.
It's really great when the guest comes in because they've heard of this tasting menu, and then they come in the next day, and then they have a whole other experience. They see the full circle of it all and know that they have that salmon dish, and then a salmon Danish the next day.
What advice would you give to someone who wants a career in this industry?
Tim FloresNever forgetting that you're serving and taking care of other people. That can be extremely difficult at times when you're dealing with whatever is going on in your personal life. That can be a draining and very taxing job, because people aren't always very nice, and we have to remember that we don't know what they're going through, and all we can do is offer our service and try to make it the best experience we can.
Genie Kwon
Whether you want to do something super casual up to super fine dining, to us, it is the same. Whether somebody wants a cookie or whether somebody wants a $200 plus tasting menu, we genuinely want to exceed what they're expecting.
Hero image: Daniel Kwon / Tim Flores and Genie Kwon of Kasama
