- Michael Gebert
- Chef AC Boral before “No Guts, No Glory”
“Street food is a pretty common part of life there, at least where my family grew up,” Chef AC Boral said of the Philippines. “You see people just kinda hustling, they have their own individual street food that they’re hustling. Pretty much anything that you could just fry up or grill up, you see it.” Street food, as it happens, was about to be part of the menu at “No Guts, No Glory,” a pop-up dinner held Saturday at Ampersand, the pop-up space inside Kinmont in River North. The room, which is tall, dark, and handsome (in keeping with the restaurant’s Wisconsin-lodge look) had been redecorated with a whimsical hint of the Philippines via authentic tablecloths and chalk illustrations and sayings drawn around the room.
Roxas-Alvarez told me that when they did the first dinner with Boral last October “we knew most of the people who came, it was like friends, we called them up and said hey, come on over.” But this time it seemed to be drawing a crowd—enough to fill the room at Kinmont, anyway—of people interested in seeing another side of Filipino food. “I only know a couple of the names on the guest list,” Roxas-Alvarez said before the doors opened. “It’ll be a pleasant mix of people, I hope.”
