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She calls her pop-up series Salo (which makes this dinner “Salo-Ween”), though tonight’s really just a party for friends (plus one media guest, me, chosen because she says she liked the eclectic range of things I write about). It’s actually being held in the Ravenswood apartment of another pop-up dinner club proprietor, Julia Pham of Relish; Pham, a veteran of The Little Goat and other kitchens, is helping her do prep.
By “digs in,” she means with our fingers. When the first few dishes are ready, she and Pham come out and plop a dome of garlic fried rice in front of each of us at the table:
By the end, we all have piles of bones and bits, which we just sweep aside for the next and most accomplished course: a rich soup, something like an Asian lobster bisque, made with acorn squash, coconut milk, and whole shrimp, whose black eyes glare from just below its surface. Bizarrely, this means it’s the second time that day that I’ve had Asian squash soup with shrimp in it—I’d had pumpkin congee that morning at Cai in Chinatown. (Winner: the Filipino version.)
“Oh, it’s easy,” Gilbuena says. “You just roll the banana leaves up and recycle the whole thing.”
