Saté Kampar Fans Rejoice — Ange Branca Is Opening a New Restaurant

Kampar is coming back. / Photograph courtesy of Ange Branca

This is what you do. You go to Saté Kampar on a first date. You save it for someone special — for when Tinder, the phone psychic, your matching Deadpool tattoos or shared fear of dying alone and being eaten by raccoons tells you this is the one. That it’s going to go the distance.

That’s me, writing about the original Saté Kampar almost eight years ago. I loved that place when it opened. In its time, Ange Branca’s Malaysian restaurant was one of my favorite places in the whole city. And in a job where I eat everywhere and drink everywhere and forget a lot of restaurants before I’m even all the way out the door, Saté Kampar stuck with me. I never want to forget how I felt on the best nights I had there — drunk on BYO vodka splits laced with black currant Ribena and eating Hainanese pork sate and ayum kurma in a room so packed with bodies it was hard to move.

You feel warm and happy and cool just for being there — at one of the hottest addresses of the moment, at one of the most sought-after tables — and 30 years from now, on the anniversary of that first date, when Fishtown is a floating neighborhood of artisanal water bars and everyone is, I don’t know, eating lasers or whatever, you can look back and smile and remember the first meal you had at that cute little Malaysian place back when East Passyunk was the hottest neighborhood anywhere in Philly.

I was pissed when it closed. A victim of capitalism, short-sightedness and the pandemic (but mostly capitalism), Branca shuttered Saté Kampar back in May of 2020 after her landlord refused to renegotiate a big rent increase in the middle of a global plague that, for a little while, looked like it might effectively end the restaurant industry completely.

“No one has any idea what things are going to look like in three, six, eight months,” Branca said at the time. “We want to wait and see what makes sense.”

Ange Branca of Saté Kampar / Photograph by Neal Santos

And then, for a long time, there was no Saté Kampar. Or, rather, there was no Saté Kampar in the way I remembered Saté Kampar.

Branca did a lot of things — she worked out of industrial kitchens and friends’ kitchens, did pop-ups, started a rotating take-out operation called Kampar Kitchen that had different chefs cooking out of a South Philly catering kitchen each night for curbside pickups and deliveries. She started a series of Muhibbah dinners which brought together diverse chefs and dozens of different cuisines for big, family-style meals that benefitted local immigrant and refugee organizations, then stopped them, then re-started them again just recently.

And all the while, she was promising another restaurant. A real restaurant. Tables and everything. A place that could pick up where Saté Kampar left off and, somehow, bundle together all the other projects she had her hands in, too. And for a long time, we didn’t really know much about it. All Branca would say was that it was going to be big. It was going to be awesome. And that it was coming soon.

Now, though, we have a few details. We know that the new restaurant — called simply Kampar — will be opening in the old Nomad pizza location at 611 South 7th Street. We know that the new space is both large (about three times the size of the original) and has two floors. Also, we know when Kampar is opening. Kinda.

“January,” Branca tells me when I get her on the phone — early in the morning while she’s still answering emails. “We’re hoping for January of next year. But yes, January.”

So it’s January maybe. January if all else proceeds in a smooth and orderly fashion and everyone does what they need to do, when they need to do it. But do you know how often that happens in the restaurant industry? Absolutely never.

“It’s taking longer than I wanted, but that’s the way everything is today,” she says, laughing about it because what else are you going to do? “We got the keys three months ago. It’s all still fairly recent.”

Toli Shad grilled whole on banana leaves with a side of Sambal belacan and Kuah asam at Saté Kampar before it closed. / Photograph courtesy of Ange Branca

By which she means the new place and thinking about the new place and designing the new place because even though she’s been plotting and scheming this kind of big return since the day she knew she was going to have to walk away from her first restaurant, you can’t really make any plans until the keys are in your hand. Until you step inside your new space, close the door behind you and start imagining what it might become. “The space,” she explains, “kinda dictates the food you’re going to serve.”

There wasn’t any construction that needed to be done (thankfully), but the new Kampar required lots of cosmetic work. On the phone, she tells me how the original place — the East Passyunk place, which used to be a shoe store before it became Saté Kampar — was built out specifically for making and serving saté. Meat on sticks. That place was all about the grills, the coconut shell charcoal. This one? Not so much. “We won’t be able to have saté right off the bat,” she says. Because the space isn’t set up for that.

Instead, they’re converting Nomad’s old pizza ovens into wood-fired ovens and will be cooking over live fire. She talks about how, during the pandemic, she experimented with cooking a lot of different Malaysian foods in a lot of different ways — over bamboo, over an open fire-pit — and is excited about the ovens because she’ll be able to use them for making whole fish wrapped in banana leaves and cooking over charcoal. Because sometimes lack, sometimes necessity, sometimes circumstance dictates the food you’re going to serve, too.

Also, Branca and her crew won’t be the only ones cooking there.

Because her thing? It’s always been about bringing people together. About bringing attention to the things that are customarily overlooked in our scene.

So she’s planning on using the first floor — with its open kitchen and ovens and its small dining room — as a kind of incubator space. She’ll have two different chefs who work with underrepresented cuisines knocking out tasting menus as part of long-term residencies at Kampar. She doesn’t know exactly how it’s going to work yet (are the two chefs working together on one menu or separately on two? Are they working with the Kampar crew or just beside them?), but she’s very clear about her intentions: Opening a full-on restaurant is hard. The barriers to entry can be so high. But with this, she can help. She can introduce chefs to her customers in the hopes that her customers will become their customers, too.

“Because I need the restaurant scene to recognize these underrepresented chefs and cuisines,” she says. “Food and diversity and imagination — I’ve always been in that space. What we don’t need is another pizza place.”

Which is absolutely true.

On the second floor, Kampar will have a more traditional space. There’s a big bar up there and Branca is working with Danny Childs of Slow Drinks to develop a bar program — a first for her.

In the dining room, there’s plenty of space so she’ll be doing a menu of fast and easy bar snacks, some of the crowd favorites from Saté Kampar, plus some new things she’s been working on over the past three and a half years. On the phone we talk about roasting fish and chicken rice done like she remembers it from home (the town of Kampar, north of Kuala Lumpur); about cooking in clay pots and inside bamboo when working over fire. She says, “When coconut and spice hits an open flame? It is so different. So sweet. It just changes.”

 

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So à la carte up, tasting menus down. Sometimes there’ll be collabs, sometimes everyone will be working solo. She tells me she’s been talking to a few people about those first two residency spots, but she doesn’t want to say anything or name names just yet. Things are delicate. This close to opening, you don’t want to take any chances.

In the meantime, there’s those Muhibbah dinners and plenty of work still to be done. Kampar had a Kickstarter that brought in some money. And if you’re feeling generous or just miss the old Saté Kampar and want to help, there’s still a GoFundMe running to help the place get over the finish line. But really, at this point it’s all on Branca and her team. The new Kampar is going to be a big deal when it comes back. It could be something really special. The kind of place you remember for years.

Now all it has to do is open.

Then comes everything else.