At Lasa Filipino Cafe on a recent Tuesday afternoon, an elderly woman ecstatically hurried to the front counter’s pastry case: “I came all the way from Plainfield!”
The suburban Carol Stream bakery is a long way from Plainfield, but owner Mae Wee didn’t bat an eye at how far her customer traveled for pandesal, a staple bread roll in the Philippines.
“Oh, yeah, that happens all the time,” she said.
For the 41-year-old, gaining the approval of older generations has been crucial to the success of the cafe, which opened last September, especially during a time when many coffee shops and cafes are striving to win over the millennial demographic.
“One of the things that I wanted to do with this particular menu is appeal to the grandmas and the grandpas and the uncles and aunts — we wanted to have something that if they walked in, they would know what it is,” Wee said.
Things like bibingka — a cake made with rice flour, coconut milk and cream, topped at Lasa with salted egg and cream cheese — or the purple-hued pandesal filled with ube jam and cheese sold for just $1.95 a piece. A weekend-only favorite ensaimada, a soft brioche roll smothered in buttercream and cheese, is another hot-ticket item that pulls the community in.
This includes her parents’ longtime customers who swing by often, searching for flavors that remind them of home. Because right next door to Lasa is Hong Ning Filipino Restaurant & Grill, the Wee family restaurant for 30 years.
Hong Ning is currently closed for dine-in as it undergoes renovation following an incident in which an elderly customer accidentally drove their SUV into the entrance. Mae Wee’s mother, Marilou Wee, was compassionate about the situation and said she’s happy they are still open for takeout. Marilou Wee said her daughter is always encouraging her to take more breaks, so the temporary pause on diners worked out in that sense.
“That’s when my husband and I started entertaining the idea — maybe Mae is right, maybe she’s right. We don’t need to be hands on 100% of the time, maybe we can be more relaxed,” Marilou Wee said. “But sometimes we’re scared to delegate because our focus is, we have to make sure that everything is OK, that we attend to our customers. We come very early and we leave at night.”
That is the mindset of immigrants, she smiled — success is not simply handed to families who come to America in search of a better future for their children.
Although they had an established life in the Philippines — Marilou Wee as a loan officer and her husband, Ernesto, an accountant who worked at a bank — they decided to move partly because the political situation in Manila at the time was not stable enough to raise four children. Plus, Marilou Wee’s sister had already immigrated to California and her parents followed shortly after.
“It was a house with seven kids and it was busy and loud all the time,” Mae Wee said, smiling, about living with her aunt in the early days.
Because Mae Wee moved when she was 8, she said she had already developed enough of an understanding of the Philippines, both at a national level and in the specific provinces where her parents grew up. She retained the language, Tagalog, as well as her mom’s dialect of Kapampangan (from the prominent province north of Manila), and remembered what she was leaving behind.
“I also very distinctly remember food,” Mae Wee said, sharing a story her parents love to tell.
“When I was a small child and my parents were home on the weekends, apparently all of the street food vendors would come to our house and bill them because during the week, I would order things from them — like ice cream and always some sort of dessert — and I’d have the vendors put it on the tab,” Mae Wee said, laughing.
A lot of her memories from the Philippines are centered around food, Mae Wee said. When she first decided to open her own cafe serving traditional Filipino treats, drinks and desserts, there were specific flavors she was hoping to recreate in some iteration. The Manila latte with its rich cocoa undertone, for instance.
“That actually is an ode to my grandparents,” she said. “I started drinking coffee basically when I was a child and I just remember sitting with my grandfather and my grandmother, where they would make their coffee extra sweet, usually with condensed milk, and they would have pandesal and they would butter it and also spread condensed milk (on it). That flavor profile is very comforting to me, and why it’s in so much of our stuff.”
Some drinks are just a celebration of ingredients sourced straight from the Philippines. The sampaguita lemonade has jasmine, orange and the increasingly sought-after calamansi, a tropical citrus fruit native to Southeast Asia.
Matcha was a given, and Lasa offers two decadent versions: ube and strawberry, both featuring a velvety cream component.
For Mae Wee, owning and operating Lasa came naturally, given that restaurant ownership runs in her family. Mae Wee’s paternal grandfather, who is Chinese, owned several establishments in the Philippines, including Pin Pin Restaurant in Manila, which stood the test of time from 1945 to 1999.
Following this tradition, Mae Wee’s father, Ernesto, became a co-owner of the Filipino restaurant Cher’s Grill House in San Francisco in the late 1990s. In 2002, he moved to Illinois to take over his sister’s restaurant, Hong Ning, at its former suburban Glendale Heights location.
During that time, Mae Wee managed the family restaurant in San Francisco while attending Le Cordon Bleu’s California Culinary Academy. Meanwhile, Marilou Wee was raising their children and continued working for corporate Banana Republic in San Francisco.
Marilou Wee permanently moved to Illinois in 2015, and Mae Wee followed in 2022. Before making the shift, Mae Wee was still based in California, working full time for a biotech company (culinary track on hiatus). But she had grown so accustomed to the Chicago suburbs during her visits over the pandemic that she wanted to stay.
“That’s when we started having the conversation of wanting to do something more, something that we haven’t done yet,” Mae Wee said.
The idea for Lasa was born out of observing a need in the community. Oftentimes, a large group of people would come to Hong Ning, either from church or another gathering, and they’d only order desserts, Mae Wee said.
“That was great, of course, but it took tables away from diners — if only they had a place so close that they could sit and do that,” Mae Wee said. “There are great local Filipino bakeries that exist, but Filipino bakeries where you can sit and stay awhile with that coffee shop aesthetic didn’t exist or was very limited,” she noted.
As the idea of opening her own cafe in the former Subway shop next door to her parents’ restaurant continued to take shape, Mae Wee traveled back to the Philippines in winter 2023 to study pastry-making and dessert techniques.
Back home, Mae Wee learned the proper techniques for making pandesal and utilizing the superfood moringa to create traditional Filipino bread rolls with malunggay leaves.
Figuring out how to make ube-flavored breads taste like ube, and not just be purple, was another learning curve. She now imports an ube powder from the Philippines to add to the pandesal dough. The filling is made from grating fresh ube that’s been frozen.
A few specialty items include halo halo, a shaved ice dessert; pandan-flavored puto (steamed rice cakes); sapin sapin, a tri-colored chewy rice cake in layers of coconut, bright purple ube and langka (jackfruit), topped with toasted coconut; and mango sago — loaded with fresh mango, chewy sago (tapioca pearls) and a rich coconut milk base.
Hard to miss is the price point, which is reminiscent of a bake sale — handwritten and reasonable.
Almost everything has a story, Mae Wee said, from the treats to the trinkets gracing the walls. There are paintings from her mom’s old high school friend, prints depicting the northern provinces of the Philippines, eclectic gifts from well-traveled customers, a second-hand shell chandelier “that every Asian immigrant family has.”
“My own personal friends, my parents’ personal friends were actually customers first,” Mae Wee reflected. “But then you exchange stories and you get to chat.”
With a growing interest in cafes celebrating different cultures and cuisines, new customers stroll into Lasa all the time, Mae Wee said, acknowledging the notable rise in Filipino bakeries across Chicago. Brick-and-mortar establishments like Del Sur attract swaths of customers willing to wait hours in line for longanisa croissants or calamansi chamomile buns.
Recently opened Sarima Cafe, a new spot from “Top Chef” contestant Zubair Mohajir in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, fuses Filipino flavors with Indian cuisine, while Mano Modern Cafe offers classic Filipino items like lumpia alongside ube tiramisu. Mae Wee sources Lasa’s Filipino coffee from the co-owner of Mano Modern Cafe.
For Lasa’s coffee drinks, the staff uses a general dark roast, with the option to choose barako coffee beans, known for their pungent aroma and bold flavor.
Everything on the menu has to first please her own palette, said Mae Wee, and, of course, the taste buds of her dedicated staff and the friendly neighbors next door.
“I always try to recommend other places as well, like if you’re looking for something and I don’t have this, I’ll tell you who has it,” she said. “This is our niche, this is our menu. And I just want to do our menu and do it right.”
Lasa Filipino Cafe, 600 North Ave., Carol Stream; 630-949-2652, hongningrestaurant.com/s-projects-side-by-side
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