At the age of 13, chef Danilo “DJ” Tangalin was helping his mom make classic Filipino one-pot dishes out of a food shack in Baguio City. He’d grill skewers of meat, seafood and veg every day after school. On weekends, he’d make halo-halo by shaving a massive block of ice that he first had to lug from a wet market. The memories are clearly indelible for Tangalin.
“I had the best time,” he says. “Cooking was a way of paying the bills — cook and sell what we can so we have money to buy food the next day.” And while he never thought he’d ever be a professional chef, the 40-year-old father of three takes his success in stride. “Transitioning to cooking as a career was natural,” he says. “I was classically trained under a French chef in culinary school and my first gig was under Eric Ripert.”
Just Eric Ripert. No big deal.
In the year he spent at the French chef’s now-shuttered 10 Arts at the Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia, he cooked alongside Michael Collantes, who was fresh off a stint working for Joël Robuchon in Vegas. The pair of Pinoys hit it off, became chums (copains, as the French say) and now, 15 years later, they’ve opened a brasserie of their own.
It’s a fitting name, Chez Les Copains, but if you’re expecting a facsimile of Brasserie Bofinger, Gallopin, Bouillon Chartier and other such Parisian bastions of Art Nouveau, don’t. “It all feels a bit staged,” said my dining copain about Chez Les Copains’ narrow dining room. And while the hand of Wayfair may have accoutered portions of this second-story space inside the City Food Hall, Tangalin’s dishes are a lot more stylish, be it the two-bite potato croquette nestled in a stellar remoulade topped with Maryland blue lump crab ($9), or steamed mussels ($18) in a sofrito-scented Danish blue cheese sauce.
That liquid is so revelatory, it ought to be made into a soup. I sopped up the sauce with the toasted brioche served with the escargots ($20), and used the house potato chips served with the mussels to hold those buttery snails instead. I know, sacre bleu. Hey, the only potatoes that really matter at a brasserie are mashed potatoes, aka pommes purée ($12). Tangalin adds a bit of smoked cream cheese into the mash — “sprinkling what I’ve learned along the way,” he says. Forking up rich mouthfuls while staring at The Complete Robuchon sitting on a bookshelf above the kitchen window seemed as apropos as an order of steak frites ($35). After all, it features the second-most important potato preparation in a brasserie, the French fry. And these potatoes also pass muster. Another Tangalin spin: The hanger steak comes coated in beurre vert, a beurre blanc infused with fines herbes.
But there are better entrees to be had here, in my opinion: dry-aged duck ($45) thrice lacquered with orange glaze and served with a white bean cassoulet and duck confit; lemony amberjack meunière ($34) in a caper-laden beurre noisette (brown butter); and bouillabaisse ($36) with all local seafood — snapper, Cape Canaveral shrimp, clams — plus PEI mussels in a pearl-couscoused pomodoro sauce scented with bouquet garni and basil. All paired well with a Pewsey Vale Dry Riesling a friend procured from Arden next door. Chez Les Copains, you see, can’t serve alcohol until the whole City Food Hall opens (which always seems to be “next week”), so it’s BYOB until then.
It wasn’t the only gaffe. Garlic and a copious shaving of parm masked the flavor of mushrooms in the one-bite duxelles ($7) on toasted brioche; dull plating and an insipid vadouvan dressing didn’t make for a playful tuna crudo ($20); sweetbread bourguignon ($22) was hardly the comforting stew we expected but, confusingly, mashed potato streaked with mirepoix jus topped with braised thymus; and desserts, whether the too-sweet (though pretty) lemon tart ($13), overly dense chocolate cremeux ($13) or deconstructed apple galette ($13) without flakiness, didn’t quite stand up to the quality of the savories.
FWIW, that sweetbread bourguignon wasn’t on the menu when I revisited. A ginger-poached half-lobster cocktail ($28) had taken its place and — shocker — it won us over. So did the dramatic presentation of steak tartare and bone marrow ($24), a dish already making the rounds on TikTok and Instagram. Like the others, the dish is a testament to Tangalin, a third-culture kid confident in his abilities and proud of his heritage.
“I moved here when I was 16,” he told me. “English is my third language, but I still speak Ilocano and Tagalog.” Given his fluency with brasserie classics, he might want to add French to that list.
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This article appears in Apr 2-8, 2025.
