ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

Three years ago, when I thought I’d grown accustomed to pandemic-era takeout, I lugged home a truly impressive box from a Fattened Caf pop-up. The box itself could have held a modest wedding cake. Inside, Charlene Lopez-Young and Darren Young had arranged a feast of their Filipino barbecue dishes around four generous scoops of rice: rib tips in tribute to St. Louis, the stew kare kare made with beef brisket, a chicken quarter glistening with char on a bed of neon-purple pickled cabbage.

A flower the same vibrant hue as the cabbage and a miniature flag of the Philippines stuck in a mango wedge garnished the assortment. Lopez-Young and Young couldn’t have improved the presentation by transferring it from a box to a porcelain platter. And the food was as delicious as it was gorgeous.

I added the Fattened Caf to the 2022 edition of my STL 100, where it remains in 2025 for the fourth consecutive year. As I said, though, I was late. At the time of my first takeout experience with Lopez-Young and Young’s Filipino barbecue, they had been staging pop-ups for a few years.

The couple moved to St. Louis from Los Angeles for careers outside the restaurant industry. What would become the Fattened Caf began as a shared exploration of Lopez-Young’s Filipino heritage and Young’s passion for grilling and smoking. Dinners for friends evolved into pop-ups.

By 2022, those pop-ups regularly occurred at Earthbound Beer, the craft brewery on the Gravois Park side of Cherokee Street. The Fattened Caf eventually established full-time residency at Earthbound, which continued until last year, when Lopez-Young and Young debuted their own brick-and-mortar storefront. (Earthbound closed in December.)

The new Fattened Caf, which opened in August on South Jefferson Avenue just south of Cherokee Street, is strikingly spacious, with ample square footage and a high ceiling. It operates as both a cafe and a restaurant, with lounge seating in the front and dining tables along one wall and in the back. At the heart of the expansive room is the Fattened Caf’s open kitchen, coffee bar and the counter where you order.

The menu, which varies somewhat between lunch and dinner, includes such signature dishes as the barbecue chicken marinated in banana ketchup and soy sauce that I first encountered in my takeout box. As always, the Lopez-Young and Young pay tribute to St. Louis alongside the Philippines with pork steak marinated in a tangy, just-sweet-enough Filipino barbecue sauce. The pork steak is thin, in the true St. Louis style, but it retains the cut’s ideal texture, a little chewy, but still succulent.

The Fattened Caf’s most renowned dish is probably is its sweet longganisa sausage, which has also been available in retail packages for a few years now. At the restaurant, the smoky, snappy chicken sausage is served with garlic rice that draws out its spices and pineapple slices that round out its juicy sweetness.

You can also order this longganisa as the Ube Longdog, served inside a hot dog bun the color of the eponymous purple yam and topped, like a New York-style hot dog vacationing in Manila, with pickled papaya, among other garnishes. Besides the chicken sausage, the Fattened Caf also makes its own version of Spam, springy with ground pork, a little sweet, with just a hint of smoke.

One of the essential components of Filipino barbecue is a dipping sauce. At the Fattened Caf, this leads with a smack of vinegar. Though the vinegar is potent in its own right, in many versions of the sauce it also distracts you from the fierce heat of the little red chiles lurking within.

Those chiles also simmer in the Fattened Caf’s sisig, a dinner-only dish with crisp, luscious bits of pork belly in a tart citrus crema over rice. Sisig is the only dish marked as spicy on the menu, and if it doesn’t dampen your brow as is, it comes with that dipping sauce on the side.

Another menu note demands attention. Piyanggang chicken is the “chef’s recommendation,� with a star on either side of this annotation for emphasis. The dish brings either a chicken leg quarter (lunch) or half of a chicken (dinner) in a burnt-coconut gravy unlike any sauce I’ve had, a smoky, autumnal sweetness underpinned with earthy, warming spice and a subtle, but persistent ginger brightness. I would happily eat this sauce over rice or by itself, with a spoon.

Instead, I’ll save my spoon for the Fattened Caf’s one dessert, a cup of banana pudding. Like the restaurant’s barbecue, this bridges Filipino and American traditions, with banana slices and a Nilla wafer perched in a pudding purple with ube.