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If a bus stops on the corner outside the tavern, passengers will pour out. No matter the time; it’s just that kind of a route. In the rush, you might miss a sandwich board sign hinting at barbecue.
Inside, you should order first at the long wooden bar. If the weather has turned nice, go find a seat out back. On the way, you’ll see the kitchen through a small window to your right, busy just a few days a week with a new pop-up in residence, which just opened in March.
The cook is having a moment right now with his new-school Chinese- and Vietnamese-inspired barbecue. He’s being lauded as among the most exciting, hottest new and award-winning. The accolades come after he left a career in finance, to follow a dream of smoking meat.
But it hasn’t been an overnight success. Umamicue was built on one 14-hour smoked brisket at a time. It’s been 10 years in the making, sometimes heartbreaking.
Umamicue owner and pitmaster Charles Wong has forged a family bond and cultural identity through his extraordinary brisket banh mi and more, while finding a home and community at Spilt Milk Tavern in Chicago.
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Most people understand umami, Wong said, but some still don’t, so I asked him how he explains the namesake savory taste.
“It’s that salty, sweet, makes you want to dance when you eat — even if you don’t dance — flavor,” he said, laughing. “We wanted to represent Umamicue in the flavors we grew up eating, with the techniques of low and slow barbecue.”
Wong started out solo, but found two key mentors: chef Andy Lim and general manager Thomas Oh of Perilla, a modern Korean American restaurant.
“I did my first ever pop-up at Perilla,” said the pitmaster about his debut event in February 2020. “And then the pandemic happened. So we took a pause.” Eventually he resumed with a pop-up back at Perilla in April last year.
Wong also has help from his girlfriend and parents.
His parents, Theresa Wong and Phuong Namhuynh, are ethnically Chinese, but were born and raised in Ho Chi Minh City, then known as Saigon.
“They immigrated here in the ’70s, when the North took over the South,” said their son. “My mom decided to change her name back to our Chinese name. While my dad kept his Vietnamese name.”
Umamicue’s decidedly Vietnamese American prime brisket banh mi has become Wong’s signature. Wong makes each sandwich to order, stuffing beautifully buttery beef into the defining bread that’s crisp outside and soft inside.
Crunchy pickled daikon and carrots nestle within swipes of housemade chile barbecue sauce and Kewpie mayonnaise. He finishes each offering with whisper thin slices of cucumber and jalapeno, and aromatic cilantro leaves, fluttering like gold leaf.
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“We pull the stems away from the cilantro so you’re getting just the leaves,” Wong said. “And that to me is the perfect banh mi.”
I loved the precise attention to detail, a sign of the breathtaking bites to come. I picked so much cilantro when I worked at a Chinese Vietnamese cousin’s restaurant, so I can appreciate exactly how to pull those leaves so they stay whole. The precise slices took me back to my Michelin three-star stage at Ducasse in Paris.
So who does all that prep for the sandwiches?
“My dad does it actually,” Wong said. “I gave him a little Japanese mandoline. He’ll just be like, ‘What do you need for the day?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, I need a quart of this, I need a quart of that.’ And he’s like, ‘OK, great.’ Then he’ll just do it.”
His son pauses for a moment before continuing.
“Leaving finance and going into the food world really disappointed my parents,” Wong said. “It was very hard to do this, because I didn’t have their support.”
But when he got his smoker, with what he made from his first big catering gig, things changed.
“I felt like it was the first time my dad was really proud of me,” said the pitmaster, his voice breaking. “I respect and really love him, so for him to do that for me is amazing.”
No wonder every single cilantro leaf and precise slice evoked such deep emotion.
“And my mom too,” her son said. “She was really worried about the direction that I was heading in. And it was a dark, dark place for me.”
Now, the pitmaster and his father are bonding over barbecue.
“He asks me questions like, ‘Hey, how are you doing this?’” said his son. “And he tries to make dishes with me.”
The crispy pork belly seemed already perfected to me and my parents, 88- and 89-year-old Mom and Pop Chu. But we were skeptical at first, because it looked a lot like what we’ve found at Chinese delis around the world all our lives. Then we tried it, and now we may be spoiled for the rest of our lives. The crisp skin crackles over supple, smoky meat.
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“I wanted to create something that was like siu yuk, for sure,” Wong said. But he wanted to smoke it, not just roast it, the way it’s traditionally done. “And I tried different iterations.”
Then at the Windy City Smokeout last year, he found crispy pork belly on the pit by Hoodoo Brown BBQ and got pointers from their pitmasters. Wong was working with LeRoy and Lewis, where he had done a formative stage of his own at the new-school barbecue restaurant in Austin, Texas.
He also tucks crispy pork belly cubes into bread for banh mi.
The smoked brisket egg rolls, really more like fried spring rolls or their Vietnamese cousins cha gio, come from a family recipe by Wong’s maternal grandmother.
“We call them egg rolls in our family,” Wong said. “My grandma used to make it. Then my dad, when he had a blue-collar job when he was working, he would make it maybe two, three times a year for his co-workers, and they would go nuts over it. So when I went to my finance job, I would also make it for my co-workers, and they would go nuts for it too.”
But now he’s changed the family egg roll recipe from pork to brisket. They’re skinny, but shatter to reveal a generous filling of smoked meat, vegetables and glass noodles so flavorful, you can forgo the dip of housemade sweet chile sauce.
The crab Rangoon captures a layer of smoke that’s evident, but nuanced, in a flawlessly fried flower-shaped shell.
“I was hesitant to do it,” Wong said. “Because, growing up, my parents were like, that’s not real Chinese food. But, I was eating Panda Express or whatever. This is my experience with Chinese American food. And I love crab Rangoon.” He’s not a huge fan of imitation crab meat though, so uses real lump crab meat, and scallions too.
The smoked cream cheese is absolutely brilliant, and lends a terrific interpretation of Chinese American food.
The smashed cucumber side leans more traditional with fresh, crunchy chunks, dressed in garlic, soy sauce and sesame oil. It had scant sign of the promised red pepper heat, however, and begged for a hit of acidity.
The nuoc cham potato salad was so good, it made me forget about sneaking in some rice on my second visit.
“We were trying to find a balance with sweet, salty and sour,” Wong said. “And nuoc cham has that fish sauce umami in it.” He mixed the Vietnamese dipping sauce with Kewpie, then topped it all with freshly torn mint and basil, plus crispy onions for even more texture.
I ordered everything on the thoughtful, concise menu. But not the shaking beef sausage, because the pitmaster has pulled it for now.
“It was a big hit for people in terms of flavor,” he said. “But what we’re missing is the snap you get from a traditional sausage that I’m obsessed with trying to make right. Because if you’re in Chicago, you want that snap like Polish sausage.”
He’s making his own, so it’s even more of a challenge.
“I’m trying to figure out if it’s my technique,” said Wong. “Or if it’s some of the ingredients in there that’s not cohesive to making that sausage snap.”
Plus the cocktails and community at the tavern are worth their own visit.
“Spilt Milk is your neighborhood cocktail bar,” said Tony Selna, co-owner with Jason Freiman. “The design and ambience makes it feel like it’s hoity toity, but it’s not. It’s just a laidback bar.”
Open seven years, they’ve experienced a lot of changes. But the bartenders work shockingly fast, especially at their level of craft cocktail, paired with sincere hospitality.
Even with on-the-fly, nonalcoholic dealer’s choice drinks. Assistant manager Mel Manzo made me a glorious spritz with Giffard grapefruit alcohol-free liqueur, garnished with candied ginger, all so delicious that I grilled her on ingredients in hopes she could make it again.
The Logan Squares cocktail on the menu was bar manager Izzy Kanney’s creation, Selna said. It’s a lovely Old Fashioned-inspired drink with bourbon, tobacco bitters and a housemade banana syrup made with Miller High Life beer.
“We brought in a barback who was the general manager at La Colombe for many, many years,” Selna said. “He had been messing around in his kitchen at home making syrup out of beer, and he was using High Life. I’ve made syrups using stouts, for winter cocktails, but I never thought of using High Life beer.”
In addition to the collaborative cocktail space, Selna created a community at Spilt Milk with unique food service, years before Umamicue’s residency. Most notably, in 2018 he started Family Meal Monday on the back patio. An all-star lineup of chefs cooks every week from May through September. That’s $20 for a plate of food and a drink.
“I love being a bar owner,” he said. “But I love just coming together and breaking bread too. And watching people sit down and eat Umamicue has been great.”
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And he’s just about finished with another all-star lineup coming up this year, starting with a mutual chef friend he shares with Wong.
“We have Perilla kicking it off,” Selna said. Then Galit, Publican Quality Bread, Pompette, Monteverde, Longman & Eagle, Herbivore, Superkhana, Kimski, Hermosa, Kasama, Bang Bang Pie and Andros Taverna. “And my good pal Jonathan Zaragoza. So that’s the list so far.”
Meanwhile, Umamicue will continue its residency at Spilt Milk for at least a year.
Which addresses some of the questions I’ve heard around who “gets” to be reviewed. And who are reviews like this for now anyway?
Particularly over the past two years, the cutting-edge has gone far beyond expensive restaurants downtown. Some of our best new restaurants, in fact, remain pop-ups and virtual. But they all consistently offered exceptional food and drink, plus something more that can’t be easily replicated.
In the case of Umamicue, it’s a taste of a place where banh mi and barbecue have the power to bring together family.
Umamicue at Spilt Milk Tavern
2758 W. Fullerton Ave.
umamicue.com; spiltmilktavern.com
Open: Umamicue, Tuesday to Thursday, 5 p.m. until sold out. Milk Tavern, Monday 5 p.m. to 1 a.m., Tuesday to Thursday 4 p.m. to 1 a.m., Friday 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., Saturday 3 p.m. to 2 a.m., Sunday 4 p.m. to midnight
Eat. Watch. Do.
Prices: Umamicue, starters $5-$7; banh mi $12 half, $20 full; sides $5-$6. Milk Tavern, house cocktails $14-$15, nonalcoholic drinks $4-$9
Noise: Conversation-friendly
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible with restrooms on single level
Tribune rating: Excellent, 3 stars
Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.
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