The upcoming Strange Foods Festival started with an Instagram account. A year and a half ago Keng Sisavath, a 36-year-old dental technician, launched @strangefoodschicago to “introduce the food of my motherland,” he says. Sisavath, who was born in a refugee camp on the border of Thailand and Laos, came to the U.S. as a toddler and was raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, by Lao relatives. The problem with trying to photograph Lao food in the Chicago area according to Sisavath, is that there isn’t much: unlike Green Bay, Chicago doesn’t have a significant Lao population. “When a Lao opens up a restaurant [in Chicago] they have to put the name Thai on it because people don’t know about Lao food,” he says. “The food isn’t mainstream. I want to change that.”
A photo posted by Hidden Gems,Ethnic,cheap (@strangefoodschicago) on May 20, 2016 at 12:22pm PDT
Sisavath has more than a passing knowledge of most of the restaurants he did invite to the festival: he says he’s eaten at about 90 percent of them—in many cases, dozens of times. He estimates that he’s eaten more than 200 meals at Dancen, a Korean bar that he says is his favorite restaurant in Chicago. Most of the places he likes to eat are small and family run, and along the way he’s developed relationships with the owners. Without those relationships, Sisavath says, the festival would probably never have happened. “It’s about trust. It’s hard to get these restaurants. But I love a challenge.”
