Kampar’s Ange Branca Plans Her Comeback

Ange Branca chef and owner of Kampar / Photograph by Chingi Zee

Behind the Line is Foobooz’s interview series with the people who make up Philly’s dynamic bar and restaurant scene. For the complete archives, go here.

Ange Branca has never met a challenge she couldn’t face.

When a rent hike during the pandemic forced her to close her East Passyunk restaurant, Saté Kampar, the chef continued to make her Malaysian cuisine at pop-up events. She also launched the meal-service platform, Kampar Kitchen, collaborating with other Philly chefs to keep the city’s immigrant food scene alive during a turbulent time. Together, they sold more food than they would have been able to alone.

Finally, after four years doing pop-ups, cooking out of ghost kitchens, and running a chef incubator, Ange was able to reopen Kampar in Bella Vista, bigger and, dare we say, even better than before. This time, Kampar added new dishes to the menu, offered a bar program inspired by Malaysian cocktail culture, and had a long-term residency program for rising chefs. The restaurant was really well received, earning a spot on our 50 Best Restaurants list and being named a James Beard semifinalist for Best New Bar.

So when a fire broke out at Kampar this February, putting an indefinite pause on operations, Philly’s food community showed up for Branca. And with their help, she is keeping the spirit and mission of Kampar going.

While their brick-and-mortar is temporarily closed, Branca and her team have been bringing the Kampar experience to life at other restaurants, taking over the kitchen at places like Oyster House and Middle Child Clubhouse. They have more pop-ups on the horizon (Branca says she’s going through “a long list”), including one at Yanaga Kappo Izakaya on July 22nd, with more details coming soon to the restaurant’s Instagram.

The Kampar team is involved in other kinds of events as well. Recently, Branca and team catered a UNESCO World Heritage Brunch in collaboration with Art Philly, and for the restaurant’s next event on June 24th — a seminar focused on Malaysian-inspired cocktails — they’ll take its bar, Kampar Kongsi, to New York City’s Pier 57. On June 29th, Kampar will also be at the From Our Hands food festival held at Fleisher Art Memorial, serving soda gembira (one of its popular nonalcoholic drinks) and shaved ice.

Branca’s not just focusing on Kampar right now; she’s also continuing to support Philly’s immigrant community at a time when that work is especially crucial. Earlier in June, Branca raised over $6,000 for The Welcoming Center with the latest installment of her Muhibbah Dinners, a fund-raiser where local chefs make comfort foods from their cultures to raise money for local organizations focused on helping immigrants and refugees. (Tickets for the next Muhibbah Dinner on October 20th are on sale now.)

Here, Branca shares more about her ongoing work to lift up the immigrant community, how she’s keeping Kampar alive while the restaurant’s doors are closed, and planning to come back stronger than ever.

Kampar’s team at a Muhibbah Dinner hosted at Sor Ynéz / Photograph by Paolo Jay Agbay

After the fire at Kampar … we discovered a lot of the older infrastructure is not very safe, so we have to fix all that. It gives me a lot of peace because, while the journey of fixing it is a little crazy and painful, at the end of the day, I feel good that we will be in a much better building that’s safer for everyone.

While the fire damage was minimal, the insurance company held the building for several months, and we couldn’t touch it, so the water damage from the rain that we’ve been getting is a lot more extensive than the actual fire damage itself. It’s frustrating because it would have been a quicker fix, but now the whole building is drenched, and I have a lot of work to do to repair it. I’m just taking it one step at a time.

The response from Philly’s restaurant community has been … truly amazing. Everybody comes together. After the fire, everyone reached out to us and said, “We want to support you — come in and do pop-ups.” We had so many calls from our friends and fellow restaurants who offered us space, and so we started to make a list and schedule things out. We’re still going through that list. It’s a very long list.

While the restaurant is closed, I’m focusing on … my team. We have a really amazing team at the restaurant, all the way from the back of the house to the front of the house. This team put our restaurant in the position where we’ve earned all kinds of accolades and awards, and a month before the fire, it was this team who were nominated for a James Beard Award. Obviously, the fire put a pause on all that, but we didn’t want the team spirit to be put on pause either.

Kampar is paying the base salary for everyone on our team, so they’re not without pay, but of course we need more support. There are things that we have to do in the meantime to make sure that our team is taken care of, so everyone has some part-time jobs around the city. Still, the whole team comes together when we have events and pop-ups. It’s so good to see the team back together every now and then.

Working on pop-ups has been … really positive for our team. When we do pop-ups at different locations, we get to work in our host kitchens and make new connections. We’re learning new things with new people, so that has been really fun.

It’s a lot more work than running a restaurant, for sure! That’s why we can’t do it so frequently. We need time to rest up, too. But we’re very lucky that we have a commissary kitchen at the Culinary Collective. One of our customers, Brandon [Weizer], owns the space, and when he heard about the fire, he basically jumped right in and connected with me. It’s fully licensed, health department-inspected, and all of that, so that was very useful. Once we were able to situate ourselves there, that’s when I sat down with our managers and started to plan out how we want to do pop-ups.

Nasi lemak served at the Kampar event at Oyster House / Photograph by Kerri Sitrin

The Kampar team has also been using this time to … improve on some things. We were doing so much last year with absolutely no time to focus on making things better. Now, we actually have some time to just sit down and make some improvements, so that has been keeping us together and keeping us really busy.

We’ve been working on a lot of R&D. Sam [Pritchard, Kampar’s general manager and beverage director] is doing a lot of work to take the drink program to a different level. In the back of house, we’re doing some recipe testing and refining some recipes that we know our customers love, but we want to make them even better.

Many of Kampar’s customers have … now become close friends. They’ve been coming to the restaurant for years; before the pandemic and after the pandemic, when we reopened, they came back. Before the fire, they came back very often and became good friends of the staff as well. Then, when the fire happened, so many of them reached out in all different ways. We see them all the time. Every time we have a pop-up, we see all the familiar faces and get to say hi, and I think the only reason that we are able to successfully do these pop-ups is because of them. It’s truly amazing.

When Kampar reopens … I don’t think we’re going to make a lot of changes. My whole restaurant — from the old space on Passyunk Avenue to the one in Bella Vista — has a very similar vibe. With Kampar, I’ve tried to bring Malaysian food back to the ‘60s and the ‘70s, when it was at its prime, before Western influences like fast food. Those are the memories that I’ve tried to preserve, and I hope to recreate that for everyone in a much better working space. That’s how I started, and that’s what I want to continue to preserve.

Photograph by Paolo Jay Agbay

Outside of Kampar, I’ve been busy with … the Muhibbah Dinners, which I started in 2017. At the time, I was a new business owner, supporting a staff of all immigrants, and on top of that, it was the height of Islamophobia, and Malaysia is a Muslim country, so we decided to have halal food available. Immigrants were scared and afraid — it’s similar to what we are going through right now — and that was something that I felt for the very first time living in the U.S. I came here in 2000, so I’ve been here for quite a while.

So, I started working with nonprofits in Philly that support immigrants and refugees. They were struggling without funding to do a lot of their work, so I had a meeting at my restaurant with a few directors of these organizations and asked how I could help. I’m not an expert in immigrant work, but I have a restaurant, and I can connect people with food, and that’s how Muhibbah started. While there were lots of protests happening in the city speaking to the importance of immigration, we needed another avenue to celebrate it in a different way, in a way that’s more joyful and feeds the soul — but also really highlights how beautiful immigration can be. Food is always a good way to do that.

The word “muhibbah” … is from the Malay language and means people of multiple cultures coming together in peace and tolerance. Since the 1400s, Malaysia has been a hub of the spice trade, and so we have been a very diverse place for centuries — to the point that we actually have a word to describe that kind of multicultural diversity and tolerance. I knew I needed to use that word because this is the kind of sentiment we needed to cultivate in that time, like the one we’re going through now.

Muhibbah Dinner hosted at Rex at the Royal / Photograph by Kerri Sitrin

The first Muhibbah Dinner … sold out so fast. We had only 50 seats because that’s as much as my restaurant could pack in. Seven different chefs came together. I told them the idea was to highlight the beauty of immigration, because each one of them comes from a different part of the world. So rather than cooking a dish from their restaurants, I wanted them to cook a dish that spoke to their heritage.

After the first round was so successful, I decided to keep it going, and it just never stopped. Tickets are very limited, but we want to keep it that way so that you can actually have the full experience of the chef talking about the meal. It’s not just about eating a delicious dinner and leaving; it’s about hearing these stories of how people came here and what they brought. For all of us immigrants, when we leave our home country, there are very few physical things that we can bring along with us. But the one thing every immigrant brings with them, no matter where they go, is their food, and that is such a beautiful thing to share.

Another community effort that I’m proud of is … Kampar Kitchen, a platform that I started during the pandemic when many of us lost our restaurants and some chefs lost their jobs. A group of us came together, and we realized how challenging it was to sell our food. We were chefs who make ethnic food or immigrant food that is not yet mainstream — things like Malaysian food, for example, or a very specific type of Mexican food that’s not tacos, Sri Lankan food, and Chilean food. We all had a really hard time trying to reach customers during the pandemic, so I started the Kampar Kitchen platform. All of a sudden, we were selling more food than we had sold individually.

My grandmother always taught me that a rising tide raises all ships. That’s basically the theory behind it. If you create some kind of a wave, it raises everyone up.