Kampar

THIS IS NOT A DRILL! MOD SPUDS’ GRAND OPENING IS THIS FRIDAY, MAY 15TH STARTING AT 11AM! 🥔🎉📣 Only 2 days until you can eat all your favorite loaded jacket potatoes again. Those of you who found free potato tickets during our scavenger hunts: don’t forget to redeem your free potato our first week, by May 22nd. If you didn’t get one don’t worry, we have plenty of fun games planned for the future! ⏰ Hours starting this Friday: Wednesday - Monday 11am-9pm (closed Tuesdays) 📍 Location: 1424 South Street 📲 Online ordering for pick up: Coming soon to modspuds.com 🚗 Delivery: Coming soon after opening on UberEats

Last night, Chef Ange had the incredible honor of receiving the Margaret Harris Award at @nscphila ’s Global Tastes surrounded by friends, colleagues, and her team. ❤️ It was such a beautiful night filled with food, speeches, performances, and community. What made it even more special was having our team there to celebrate alongside Ange. As an honoree, Chef Ange also had the opportunity to curate the evening’s menu and invite an amazing group of talented, diverse friends to participate with us. We are so grateful to all the restaurants who shared their delicious food: @cakelifebakeshop @dasgoodcafephilly @hrzcoffeefishtown @juanatamale @la.llamita.vegana @ricensambal @whiteyakrestaurant @yanaga_kappo_izakaya @thecakevault.phl @chibanos_philly @habibisupperclub @margiescuisine @reggaereggaevibes @southphillybarbacoa_ @tambayanphilly @vientianebistro NSC is one of Philadelphia’s leading immigrant and refugee service organizations, empowering people to thrive in our communities and pursue a more just future. Please give them a follow to learn more about their work and support their mission. ❤️

Back in the @culinary.collective kitchen after foraging, our team got to work turning what we gathered into ingredients for future Kampar amari, ferments and cordials.  As we look forward to the reopening of Kampar, our focus is on capturing and preserving the flavors of spring. We are always looking to explore and learn more about traditions of preservation from around the globe. For this foraging trip, we focused on four time-honored methods of preservation: ♦️ Cheong: Deeply rooted in centuries of Korean food culture, cheong is a sugar preservation that adds depth and balance while preserving flavor. Like many forms of preservation, it can also work as a traditional home remedy to aid digestion and help upset stomachs. The team experimented with knotweed, Chinese Magnolia flowers, and Eastern Red Buds. ♦️ Lacto Fermentation: Generations of communities throughout Malaysia and the world beyond have practiced fermentation that utilizes the organic preservative properties of lactic acid. Both the bar team and Chef Ange worked to create Japanese Knowtweed pickles and brine to preserve the flavors of spring. ♦️ Shrubs: With roots arising from the Middle East during the Middle Ages, shrubs are one of our favorite means of preservation. Utilizing sugar and vinegar, shrubs allow us to preserve fruits and vegetables for months, if not years. All of our scraps from the other preservation processes were turned into shrubs for a variety of future uses. ♦️ Tinctures: Since the rise of distillation in the Islamic Golden Age of the 8th century, people have used alcohol as a solvent to both extract flavor and preserve. For the bar program at Kampar, we started the process of creating several tinctures that will allow us to build depth of flavor while capturing the essence of spring. From Cyprus tinctures to floral amari, these tinctures will play an integral role in flavor development when the bar returns to action.

Lately, our team has been spending time foraging around Philadelphia and collecting the first buds of spring that you’ll be seeing in a future amaro, ferment, or cordial when Kampar reopens. As spring arrives, our team set out to collect one of our favorite ingredients to work with, Japanese Knotweed. A flowering perennial native to Eastern Asia, Japanese Knotweed was introduced to the U.S. in the late 1800s for ornamental use and erosion control, and has since become one of North America’s most prolific invasive species. With tasting notes similar to rhubarb, with hints of green apple and underripe pear, we cannot wait to harvest the flavors of early spring. Along the way, we stopped to smell the roses! Chinese Magnolia, Eastern Redbuds, Cyprus, Witchazel, and many more species of botanicals were collected to be used to create unique flavors reflecting the ecosystem around us. While we continue to rebuild the restaurant, projects like these keep us connected to our purpose and remind us why we do what we do: to create something delicious, thoughtful, local, sustainable… and something worth sharing! Stay tuned, in the next post, we’ll show you what we did with everything we foraged.

We had a blast yesterday at Rittenhouse Row Spring Festival! Thank you to everyone who visited us! We really missed you all and can’t wait to see you in the restaurant this summer.

Saté Kampar is back tomorrow at @rittrow Spring Festival from 12pm-5pm! 🔥 We’ll be grilling beef, chicken, and tofu saté and serving ais limau (with or without rose syrup) + Malaysian lemongrass iced tea to go along with it. You can find us on the 1500 block of Walnut St. in the @sisterlylovephilly section. See you tomorrow!

Visit us this Saturday, May 2nd at @rittrow Spring Festival from 12pm-5pm. We’ll be vending: 🔥 Saté Daging (Beef)
🔥 Saté Ayam (Chicken)
🔥 Saté Tofu 🍋‍🟩 Ais Limau (Limeade - with or without rose syrup)
🍋 Malaysian Lemongrass Iced Tea We’ll be on the 1500 block of Walnut St. in the @sisterlylovephilly section with all our friends. See you Saturday… rain or shine!

Malaysia R&D trip part seven: drinks 🍹 We’re passing the mic to @delicata_guap for our VERY LAST R&D trip video! 🎙️ As we traveled through Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, and Malacca, we discovered that drinking culture is deeply rooted in experience: layered flavors, a connection to the land, and a strong sense of tradition. In a majority Muslim country like Malaysia, alcohol is not the focus for many. What stood out most was the breadth of beverages that go far beyond alcohol, including: ♦️ Medicinal herbs ♦️ Ailment-soothing tinctures ♦️ Coffee ♦️ Teas ♦️ Fresh juices Shout-out to the bars we visited: ♦️ @bargaya.kl ♦️ @rimbarkl ♦️ @jwc.cabinet8.kl ♦️ @theriffdistrict ♦️ @SinHiapHin ♦️ @theatticbarkl ♦️ @barpahit …and so many more! Thank you for the wonderful hospitality, friends! Now that we’ve wrapped our R&D series, the work is far from over. We’re continuing to explore, refine, and utilize everything we learned as we prepare for Kampar’s reopening.

NSC is thrilled to honor Ange Branca with this year’s Margaret Harris Award! Named for one of NSC’s longest-serving volunteers and supporters, this award is presented to a “person or organization who has gone above and beyond to help NSC serve our clients through significant technical expertise, resources, and other supports.” Join us to honor Ange, celebrate the contributions of immigrants and immigrant cultures, and raise funds for NSC’s vital support services. Read more about Ange: https://bit.ly/4vrNmge Purchase tickets to Global Tastes 2026: /for/globaltastes2026/event/globaltastes2026/

Malaysia R&D trip part six: visiting Malacca For this one, we’re passing the mic to John. 🎙️ Here in Malacca we learned about: ♦️ How much of the city’s history has been shaped by European conquest and colonialism. ♦️ A hub of the spice trade, over the centuries, the city has fallen under the Portuguese, the Dutch, and finally the British, yet retains a distinct identity and manages to be representative of the diversity of Malaysian culture more so than any other place you will visit in the country. ♦️ How Malacca is the home of Baba/ Nyonya, which gave the world Nyonya Cuisine, originally Chinese recipes localized with Malay ingredients. ♦️ A Famosa, the 500-year-old citadel built by the Portuguese and the symbol of town’s strategic significance on the Strait of Malacca. And we ate & drank: ♦️ Malacca’s world-famous chicken ball rice ♦️ Ange’s family’s favorite stall for pork sate ♦️ Otak otak ♦️ Bowls of Nyonya Laksa out on the streets ♦️ Grilled shellfish in the alleys ♦️ Tiger beer ♦️ Cocktails from the oldest bar in town (@sinhiaphin ) run by a friendly auntie whose family has owned the place for 4 generations! Stay tuned, we have ONE last Malaysia R&D video to share with you. Any guesses what it’s about? Here’s a hint: 🍹

Malaysia R&D trip part five: visiting Cameron Highlands In this region we: ♦️ Saw where the Teh Tarik we serve at Kampar is grown ♦️ Enjoyed an old fashioned charcoal hotpot lunch with lots of fresh produce from the nearby farms. ♦️ Went deep into the jungle to spend a couple days with the indigenous Semai tribe. ♦️ Learned all about how the Semai hunt and harvest food ♦️ Cooked with the Semai people in bamboo on charcoal. It was some of the best food of the trip! In our next video we’ll be heading to the historic town of Melacca. Then, finally, we’ll tell you about what we drank in Malaysia. #kamparphilly #malaysia #visitmalaysia #tehtarik

Malaysia R&D trip part four: food of Kampar and Ipoh The food in Kampar and Ipoh is quite different from the food in Kuala Lumpur and other parts of Malaysia. Our team learned quickly that each state and region has its own flavors. This video features: ♦️ Hakka Chinese dishes adapted with Malay ingredients ♦️ Why food tastes better here, and why the bean sprouts are so fat (it’s the spring water!) ♦️The ferment, spice, and fish stalls at the market. ♦️A soy sauce maker (every town makes their own soy sauce with different flavors) ♦️Food businesses that have survived for generations, like the charcoal fried char kwey teow and charcoal claypot chicken rice places pictured. ♦️Kopi, a Malaysian Chinese style coffee roasted with butter and sugar. Up next, we’ll take you with us into the jungle. Keep following! #kamparphilly #malaysia #visitmalaysia #malaysianfood