Salo Salo Menu at Kayu DC!

Join us for the Salo Salo menu which celebrates the heart of Filipino hospitality in the dining room at Kayu DC!!

NOTE from the restaurant: Our 3-Course Salo Salo Menu is priced at $65 per person and requires full table participation.
Inspired by the tradition of gathering around a table filled with food, drinks, and shared stories, this experience invites you to connect, share, and savor together.

Washington Post:

Each buoyant, oil-tanned doughnut at Kayu is piped full of black truffle cream, draped in prosciutto and capped with curls of smoked cheddar. Salty and sweet, peaty and intense, this is chef Paolo Dungca’s telling of an ensaymada, traditionally a small loaf of brioche baked until golden and topped with butter, sugar, and grated cheddar or mildly nutty queso de bola. Here, the baked pastry is replaced by a bombolone, a fried and filled doughnut nodding to executive chef Julie Cortes’s time spent cooking Italian food in Manila.

The dish traces back to Spanish colonizers, who arrived in the Philippines with ensaïmadas, light and flaky coils of lard-enriched pastry. In time, Filipino bakers swapped in butter for lard and revised fillings and garnishes to reflect local tastes and ingredients. The ensaymada became a culinary flag as emblematic of the Philippines as the ensaïmada is of Mallorca. At Kayu, the dish continues on its path of reinvention. It’s a fitting symbol for Dungca’s expansive vision for Filipino cuisine.

Until last June, Dungca operated Kayu as a tasting menu restaurant on Washington's H Street NE, a showier, tweezer-ier place built around an L-shaped open kitchen where Dungca, 35, might lean over the counter to explain kinilaw’s similarity to ceviche or tell the sentimental backstory of a gingery chicken broth sipped on stormy days in Manila, where he grew up. In 2004, 13-year-old Dungca moved to Los Angeles with his family, and in 2014, he relocated to D.C., where he served as the opening sous chef at the late 24-seat Filipino standard-bearer, Bad Saint.

Following a split with his business partners, he closed Kayu’s short-lived first location and reopened on 17th Street NW in August. The new Dupont Circle space, divided between a cozy upstairs dining room and a basement-level kitchen, requires a different form of storytelling from the intimate up-close approach Dungca is accustomed to. With the chef downstairs and servers flitting between tables, dishes must now speak for themselves.

This leads to some thrilling first encounters. Whether or not you were acquainted with bagoong before it hit your table, you’ll understand the essential Filipino condiment’s appeal when you taste a radicchio salad practically quivering with the goodness of so much naturally derived glutamate and interspersed with bits of smoked bacon. To make it, Dungca combines dried shrimp and scallops with fat from Maryland crabs and beet juice to stain the mixture its customary clayish brown. It appears again in fried rice, its piscine punch softened by heat to reveal a sweeter, more furtive side. A good rule of thumb: Order anything at Kayu graced with this bagoong.

Though many of Dungca’s dishes gesture only loosely toward ones you might find on a more traditional menu, he returns so often to the condiments, seasonings and building blocks of Filipino cooking that, when the meal is done, I feel closer to the heart of the cuisine. Dungca says that in the past, he would deflate when the occasional purist accused him of bastardizing Filipino food. Now, he says, “I embrace that*.*” You won’t find chicken adobo at Kayu, but on the weekends there’s a bang-up adobo chocolate chip cookie, flavored with bay leaf powder and rice wine vinegar and garnished with pink peppercorns.

Cocktails draw on a variety of island cultures, creating a roster of tropically inspired drinks that stand up nicely to the assertiveness of Dungca’s cooking. An otherwise standard Old Fashioned was bright and cheery with pandan. A slender chile floating in a mezcal-and-peach-schnapps number gave each sip a tickling heat.

Maybe Dungca just needed time to figure out how to distill the grand ambitions of a tasting menu into a decidedly more humble neighborhood spot. Whatever clicked into place before my two most recent visits, this is a good time to make your way to Kayu. The chef’s cooking now reflects the sharpness of his menu, which he arranges around a very reasonable format: For $65 and some optional supplements, each diner chooses three courses, most of which are dropped at the center of the table as a feast unfolds.

The restaurant serves one of my favorite steaks in town, a strip loin fanned over kare kare, a stew traditionally defined by its use of peanuts but interpreted here as a rich cashew curry even sweeter, creamier and smoother than its blueprint. It comes with piaya, a dimpled disk of flatbread you should mop across the plate until every last puddle of sauce is gone.

I’m fairly sure you haven’t had pancit like Dungca’s, which brings together fresh egg noodles and the first Maryland blue crab of the season in a delicate brown-butter dashi. “I think food evolves over time, and our experiences in America play a factor in that,” Dungca says when I ask about his spin on the classic noodle stir-fry. “Just being able to enjoy crabs in the DMV was the sole inspiration for that dish.”

The chef has a knack for fried chicken, which shows up masterfully juicy and glistening with chile oil between two shamrock-green halves of a faintly grassy pandan bun. Better still is a sandwich served on the weekends at Morena, a collaboration between Dungca, Cortes and manager Bless Barrios that transforms Kayu’s dining room into a counter-service Filipino cafe.

The fried chicken in the weekend-only sandwich is coated in pamapa itum, an ash-black condiment of burned coconut meat and warm spices that registers as sweet, smoky and invitingly bitter. Ever since Popeyes triggered a national frenzy of freid-chicken one-upmanship in 2019 with its mega-viral sandwich, it’s been hard to distinguish one golden mass of bread and batter from the next. Not Morena’s, which would have more than held its own in the chicken sandwich wars.

Occasionally, Dungca still seems to be testing his material. I liked a reimagining of tahô, typically a cup of silken tofu and tapioca pearls turned here into cheesecake parfait, but was less crazy about the sizable scoop of caviar on top, which felt like a salty, distracting bit of showing off. And at the end of an early May dinner, I was thrown when an ube custard and shredded-phyllo dessert was described as a take on the viral Dubai chocolate; likewise the following weekend at Morena, where I encountered a croissant inspired by the same dish.

Perhaps I would have been a little less confused had I known at the time that the candy, which originated in Dubai in 2021, was co-created by a Filipino pastry chef. Perhaps not: The confection has grown far beyond its maker into one of the most suffocating food trends in recent memory, its virality prompting a fire hose of indistinguishable pistachio-green milkshakes, cakes, parfaits and other marketing gimmicks to be sprayed across Instagram, TikTok and, worst of all, real-life restaurant menus.

As algorithms and artificial intelligence flatten our digital lives and increasingly dictate culture beyond our screens, restaurants serve as an antidote to so much sameness. I want to eat dishes that make my eyes and synapses light up and to experience flavors I couldn’t have imagined while mining the depths of TikTok. I want the impassioned cooking of one person with a unique point of view — something Dungca has in spades. Kayu doesn’t need to lean on the easy appeal of Dubai chocolate or whatever inch-deep trend comes next. Dungca’s own ideas are far more interesting.

Check out the menu here

We ask that ALL folks honor their RSVP. If you are unable to attend after sending in a YES, please update your status so that others may join. In the event our group incurs a fee for no-shows / late cancellations, your ability to RSVP for future events will be restricted. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

WAITLIST:
Meetup does not allow a waitlist for paid events. If this event fills and you are interested in adding your name to the waitlist, please send host a message through the app.

In the future, we will vary the days of the week and the types of restaurants so that we can attract many different types of diners. Feel free to make suggestions for future meet locations. All diners will pay their own tab. before departing the event.

If you are unable to join us in August we hope you'll stay interested and join us for a meal in the future. Looking forward to catching up with you for a wonderful dinner at Kayu DC!