Chocolate meat is on the menu every day at Albany Park’s Subo Filipino Kitchen. If you happen to jump off at the Brown Line’s terminus with a taste for dinuguan, the thick, fortifying, iron-rich blood stew of the Philippines—sanguineous pork butt, snout, and stomach lit up with an acidic spark of rice vinegar—you need only turn your anemic bones a half block south on Kimball Avenue. If you have an even more particular hankering for dinuguan Ilocano, a drier, less gravylike regional variant, the cooks can do that too, but only if you’re having a party.
Eventually Minda hired cooks and started offering ready-to-go Filipino food served from steam tables behind glass sneeze guards, in a space separate from a grocery section. It featured a constant repertoire of 20 to 25 dishes prepared for decades by her longtime chefs Felipa Perez and Elsa Alvarez. The former hails from Michoacán, but she learned to cook Pinoy cuisine from Perez, who comes from Santa Rosa, south of Manila, where the food is richer, meatier, and more reflective of colonial Spanish influence than the Ilocano fare Minda grew up on—simpler, leaner, and more focused on fish and vegetables than terrestrial proteins.
Once a clever nickname to coax kids to eat their blood stew, “chocolate meat” appears in front of the parenthetical “dinuguan” on the menu over the counter at Subo. “It gets people talking,” says Rod.
For years food writers have been anxiously bestowing Next-Big-Thing status on Filipino food. In the last year alone, prominent cheffy projects like Ravenswood’s Bayan Ko and Wicker Park’s Cebu have taken strides in demystifying the cuisine for non-Pinoy. Now, without changing what they’ve served for decades, Rod and Minda Menor are raising its profile in their own way, one order of chocolate meat at a time. v
4712 N. Kimball 773-478-2599 3rcafe.com
